One thing that always happens to me after a visit to IFSEC (the greatest event in the history of civilisation, I am reliably informed) is that I tend to feel all inspired and that, not only by the beautiful use of language on display – I can’t remember the last time I saw so many ‘unique’ products in the one vast hall! – but by the very aesthetic and intellectual beauty of all the stunning security products on display.
In fact, I come away from this enormous trade fair actually enthused – a rare event for someone with as realistic an outlook on life as myself. This is only enhanced when you meet someone as inspired and as visionary as Brucie Streetband – the genius behind the ‘Cinephile’ CCTV system.
Radical thinking
Brucie kindly gave me a few moments of his time to discuss his radical new conception of what CCTV can be. And to Brucie, CCTV can be ART.
“Well, I started out by thinking to myself, what is CCTV?” he explained. “And I asked someone for a definition, and they said ‘Closed Circuit Television’, and I thought to myself, ‘Hmm.’ This was really the beginning of it.”
And from these humble beginnings did great big things begin to flourish.
“I began to question the very nature of surveillance itself,” Brucie said. “I thought about the ‘television’ part of CCTV, and the way we as people watch television in our very own lives, and of the fact that on television, people look good, we like to look at them.
“And then I started hearing about these poor CCTV control room operator type guys and gals who apparently get bored or tired of watching their monitors after 20 minutes or something and they fall asleep or surf the internet or think about shopping for potato salad or something.
“That made me think: what if these people actually WANTED to watch the CCTV images? What if they craved them, the way they crave television and classic cinema and the works of Tolstoy? What then? That would be a good thing, right?”
His argument was convincing.
Brucie bonus
The saintly Mr Streetband explained that following this revelation he indulged in a period of “really quite hardcore and intense cogitation”.
“This is not uncommon for CCTV designers,” he informed me. “These men and women often spend many, many hours meditating or indulging in other trance-like activities – sometimes incorporating sacred hallucinogens, such as peyote or Strongbow – in order to perfect their vision, to become as one with the CCTV product they are designing. So I did something similar, but I attempted to do so without the aid of drugs.”
Unfortunately, Brucie said, his meditation eventually ended in a state of total sleepingness. He blames this on external pressures, such as ‘being quite tired’, and ‘getting bored pretty easily’. But while sleeping, he had a dream. And what a dream!
“My dream was of going to a cinema revival of the wonderful films of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton,” he said. “These were tremendously entertaining films, with the falling over and the walking and so on. But the thing I really thought was attention grabbing about them was their decision to film in black and white. It gave the images a classic ‘sheen’.
“As I did further research into films that people consider interesting, I noticed that many of them were made in black and white. And do you know something? People look better in black and white. They do! Look at Elvis Presley. In black and white, he was a very attractive young man. But once you switch to full colour, he is hideous! It’s almost as if the process of adding colour adds many kilograms and years of life onto a person. In contrast, people in black and white look more youthful, and wear better suits.” And this was when Brucie had his CCTV breakthrough. “I made some discrete enquiries,” he said. “I needed to find out if Closed Circuit Television technology was even capable of reproducing the black and white images I had seen in so many iconic films, and even in some well-known photographs.
“You can imagine my joy when I found out that it was! Working with some of the most technically advanced CCTV experts in the world, we carefully and painstakingly REMOVED all traces of colour – if we understand colour as being all hues other than black, white and shades of grey – until the cameras were able to capture people in classic, beautiful black and white.”
Mystery figures
Brucie Streetband has incorporated this stunning “monochrome” technique into his Streetband-branded ‘Cinephile’ range of CCTV cameras. And no, there is no colour option.
“We have found that people are responding very positively to this new, ‘minimalist’ style of surveillance,” he said. “Instead of introducing information and clutter into a scene, we strip it down to its very basics – a figure or two against a background, often white, due to the sun or other lights. This is a very flattering look for an antagonist.
“Equally, CCTV operators have described our low light performance, in which those on camera are often obscured in the murk, or seem to bleed into the background, as ‘mysterious’, ‘dark’, or ‘noir-ish’. They are certainly evocative of the short stories of Raymond Chandler. It’s definitely heartwarming to know that your work has not gone unappreciated.”
Definitely not. It’s the unearthing of visionaries like Streetband that shows like IFSEC are made for.
