On my first visit to Bell Labs, about four years ago, I saw a research video in which surveillance cameras, looking down on shoppers in a department store, picked out each person’s outline and tracked all of their separate passages through the retail space. I was told that statistical analysis could instantly reveal not only which aisles and displays drew their attention (for market research), but also which individuals, if any, were acting abnormally (for security).

This video haunted me afterwards. First, I confess, for the sheer visual beauty of its tracing, which you can see for yourself in the “Security” scene of this work. But second, for its chilling implications. People were starting to lose their privacy, I knew, primarily through the emerging power of computer networks (databases, cookies, bots, webcams, voice recognition, and so on). This new form of surveillance was putting us into a situation unfamiliar to most Americans … but one with which I was already on intimate terms.

As the son of an American diplomat posted largely in the satellite countries behind the Iron Curtain, I had grown up aware that my movements were tracked and my bedrooms bugged. Now I wondered if by holding up some of my memories at the right angle, they could serve as a sort of mirror of today. (The “today” I had in mind pre-dated September 11th; the reflection has turned painfully sharper now.)

To revive these old memories, I pored over the photographs, diaries, letters, tapes, and films still in my possession. I traced my existence from infancy in Belgrade (1956-57) to expatriate artist in Bucharest (1981-82). As I did so, an uncanny sensation stole over me, for I seemed to be performing a kind of surveillance on myself – or rather on that other Paul Kaiser I once was, long ago.

One piece of evidence I examined was a voice tape I’d recorded in Bucharest called Thoughts on erasing blank tape . At that time, I was a frustrated writer, stymied among other things by the terrible speed of the reader’s eye skimming over sentences that had come to me so painfully slowly. As a counter-measure, I had taken to recording my texts at a pace that I could literally dictate to my readers. I was aware while dictating, however, that there were two sets of microphones picking me up: my own, on the desk in front of me, and the Romanians’, behind the walls around me.

All this came back to me, somehow, at a later encounter at Bell Labs, when I met my eventual collaborator Nicolas Tsingos and saw his work in audio analysis. He could navigate a voice through any sort of virtual 3D space, automatically re-rendering its tone in relation to the listener’s position and to any surrounding architecture. He had my voice moving all around us in his lab, and showed me this process as visualized on his monitor. There I saw a shifting web of white lines tracing the various paths taken by my voice as it reflected off the surfaces of a scene on its way to the listener. What intrigued me was that while the voice was defined by whatever virtual space we put it in, it in turn evoked that space on its own when played back through the ten speakers of the lab.

This does not pertain to the online version of Trace, from which these elements have been largely cut.

Of the content of the final work, you should know that everything in it is true except what is obviously not – the romantic story weaving its way through some of the scenes, itself the Trace of an abandoned novel I was writing twenty years ago. I wrote three texts for the woman of this novel as I was now re-imagining her, but I wanted to bring a second set of real memories into play. So I turned to a remarkable young writer, Siobhan Scarry, four of whose texts made their way into Trace.

As to the form of the work, what interested me was this. Rather than have the scenes unified by a single over-arching theme or story, I wanted a network of themes linking disparate scenes in different ways. I remembered Wittgenstein’s remark that the strength of a rope “does not reside in the fact that some one fiber runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibers.”

November 2, 2001

Credits

• Artist: Paul Kaiser
• Audio rendering: Nicolas Tsingos
• Additional texts & editing: Siobhan Scarry
• Additional voice: Lisa Cunningham
• Additional animation: Noah Weiss, Bajir Cannon
• PeopleTracking video: Jakub Segen (Bell Labs)
• Installation architect: Marco Steinberg
• Sound score for revised version: Terry Pender
• Producer: Wayne Ashley
• Encouragement & advice: Jeanine Basinger, Kathryn Kaiser, Agata Opalach, and Terence Pender
• Major support for Trace was provided by The Rockefeller Foundation, with additional support from the New York State Council on the Arts.
• This work was originally created under the auspices of a collaboration between the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Lucent Technologies.
• Voice recording was courtesy of Columbia University Computer Music Center.
• Additional animation was made possible by the Film Studies Program of Wesleyan University.