The House That Wishes You Well

"In The House That Wishes You Well, we discover a very American system: the connected doorbell. Fitted with a camera, it lets you know who's ringing the doorbell, so you can use an alert system to dissuade potential intruders. Everything is under control (or almost...). The two artists borrow a rhetorical and aesthetic power from online stocks of images, advertisements and web flows, bordering on a kind of cloud poetry. In fact, it's in purple clouds that police officers express their interest in this surveillance system that gluttonously consumes private data. Beneath its falsely ingenuous exterior, this film succeeds in unzipping our critical faculties and boosting our digital immunity.", Benoît Hické for Tënk

Amazon is marketing a video doorbell called "Ring", to be installed on the front door of one's house. Connected to an electronic lock, it allows to remotely open the door of one's home, to receive deliveries, for example. Ring is equipped with a camera, which films what is happening in front of it at any time. You can watch it on your smartphone, no matter where you are.

The film Ring proposes a montage of the most ambiguous videos captured by the doorbells.Connected to the Internet, these countless cameras become detectors, snitches, witnesses to improbable points of view. The unauthorized capture of the neighborhood, the organized spying between neighbors and the accessibility of the videos to the municipal police are turning the great dream of the automated house into a paranoid nightmare. The slightest sign captured - the flight of a butterfly, a lost dog, the shadow of a walker... - becomes suspicious, haunting the occupants of the little white house.

Software, programmed to detect behaviors, or neural networks trained to recognize faces... (perhaps assisted by click workers paid to stalk your ex.) capture, annotate, data mine, transform the mass of data, filter through biometric detection assisted by deep learning, according to a list of suspicious gestures, throw their results to public police officers or intelligence agencies...

A private spying network is progressively being built up on a peer-to-peer basis. Voyeurism is entering its deep phase.