04 Oct Mass Surveillance Projects Around the World

Driven by the desire to work with some interesting data sets, I did a search for JSON files since it seemed to be the easiest to work with for a beginner. I found a dataset of mass surveillance project names in one of Darius Kazemi’s GitHub repositories and did a sketch using that.

The idea for this sketch is simple: the list of project names appears one by one in a loop; each time a name is displayed, an eye will show up in the background; when mouse pressed, the animation will pause for the viewer to see the name of the surveillance project clearly.

In order to keep the eyes in the background while changing out the text of the names, I used an array to record the history/trace of the eyes.

The sketch turns out well, my only problem is that it does not work fullscreen or embedded. I wonder if it has anything to do with the JSON file somehow not being included when sharing outside of the editor.

To view it live, please click here.