An NYU professor triggered a debate about campus privacy in November when he decided to implant a camera in the back of his head for a year-long art project.
Now the professor, Wafaa Bilal, faces a much bigger obstacle than students who might not want their pictures taken. His body is rejecting part of the implanted device.
The Iraqi-born artist underwent surgery on Friday to remove a section of the camera apparatus, which is rigged to snap a picture every 60 seconds and publish the image on a Web site set up for the project. The pictures are also displayed on monitors in a physical exhibit at a museum in Doha, Qatar.
“I’m determined to continue with it,” Mr. Bilal, an assistant arts professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, said on Monday.
Under its initial configuration, the camera was mounted on three posts. Each led to a titanium base that was implanted between Mr. Bilal’s skin and skull. The procedure was done by a body-modification artist at a tattoo shop in Los Angeles. But the setup caused constant pain, because his body rejected one of the posts, despite treatment with antibiotics and steroids. So Mr. Bilal had that post surgically removed, leaving the other two intact.
Once the wound heals, Mr. Bilal hopes to figure out a different setup and remount a lighter camera. For now, though, he’s carrying on the project by tying the camera to the back of his neck.
The professor has offered several explanations for what motivated such an extreme piece of art. The inspiration comes from his chaotic past: Mr. Bilal fled Iraq during the first Gulf War in 1991, living in refugee camps in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia before coming to the United States. In retrospect, he wished for a record of places he left behind.
He also sees the project’s mundane, daily images as a way of slowing life down and calling attention to the present. “Most of the time, we don’t live in the places we live in,” he said. “We don’t exist in the city we exist in. Perhaps physically we exist, but mentally we are somewhere else.” Yet another explanation: The project points to the future—a future where, as Mr. Bilal sees it, communication devices will become part of our bodies.
But why not simply wear the camera, rather than implant it?
“It’s a performance,” Mr. Bilal said. “With the performance comes endurance. But also it’s a commitment. And I didn’t feel that strapping something around my neck would be the same way I’m committed to the project as mounting it to the top of my head.”
23 Responses to Health Problems Force Professor to Pull Camera From Back of Head
drangie - February 8, 2011 at 6:50 am
This is neither art nor performance. It is nutty narcissism.
cio1491 - February 8, 2011 at 7:50 am
This is old technology. Moms have always had eyes in the back of their heads.
And what kind of shampoo would you use?
berkeleyprof - February 8, 2011 at 8:15 am
He had this implant done by a piercer, not a licensed medical specialist of some sort??
And Bilal’s a professor? Shouldn’t he have understood where this frivolous act was headed?
dank48 - February 8, 2011 at 8:23 am
“When everybody’s somebody,
Then no one’s anybody.”
The academic-art equivalent of Jerry Springer. . . . In a society in which attention is the brass ring, this is art. Right. And this discussion is Homeric epic.
rmalamud - February 8, 2011 at 8:24 am
Two words: duct tape.
interface - February 8, 2011 at 8:45 am
Inspiring. I have decided to pack this academentia stuff in and have wheels surgically attached to my feet. The procedure will be done by the same kid who in 7th grade pierced my ears with a safety pin, as soon as I can find her on FB.
drjeff - February 8, 2011 at 9:13 am
berkeleyprof- I imagine he had it done by someone who does piercings because I can’t imagine any “licensed medical professional” would do it. This is WAY outside the practice of medicine, and would have violated the “do no harm” part of the Hippocratic oath (obvious even to us in retrospect, but the possibility would have been apparent to a doc prospectively). Not to mention malpractice insurance. And even if they would do it, I’m not sure how good an idea it is to be their first. But implanting titanium mounting posts is well within the “normal” practice of some of the more advanced “body modification artists.”
On reading the previous paragraph, I’m wondering how my daughter’s pediatrician justifies their (apparently lucrative) practice of piercing girls’ ears. I’m not sure I understand how it’s different, other than being more common.
To paraphrase Dr. Pangloss: we live in the strangest of all possible worlds.
writersblock - February 8, 2011 at 9:22 am
“Yet another explanation: The project points to the future—a future where, as Mr. Bilal sees it, communication devices will become part of our bodies.”
I believe we already have these–aren’t they called “mouths”?
feudi - February 8, 2011 at 9:26 am
I realize that we are all our own networks now, but maybe Professor Bilal should have listened to his own head when it started rejecting the device. Isn’t all of the output bass ackwards?
e_eddie_edwards - February 8, 2011 at 9:31 am
More than 30 years ago some chums attending Antioch Baltimore had a similar idea. They wanted to attach a video camera to the top of a motorcycle helmet with clamps and duct tape, walk around the city and record the results.
They were dissuaded by their adviser, who quipped: “What are you going to record pictures of, besides people gawking at an idiot with a camera taped to his brain pan?”
physicsprof - February 8, 2011 at 9:57 am
Poor guy, his tenure project failed.
22199179 - February 8, 2011 at 10:10 am
sewiously?
bbetsy56 - February 8, 2011 at 12:37 pm
Was this a post from The Onion?
anonytrans - February 8, 2011 at 12:46 pm
Expert piercers regularly implant metal objects into people’s bodies (check out bmezine.com for examples – or don’t). Whatever you might think of it, it’s not so unusual.
rlevine - February 8, 2011 at 1:01 pm
He needs this project like a hole in the head.
11253423 - February 8, 2011 at 1:56 pm
And what kind of shampoo would you use? cio1491 – February 8, 2011 at 7:50 am
Head & Shutters
qweruiop - February 8, 2011 at 11:33 pm
Please tell me this project was not funded with federal grant money. Money generated by tax payers who would no doubt love to see their taxes hard at work here. And Liberal Art students wonder why the general public sees their medium with such distate.
austinbarry - May 17, 2012 at 10:08 am
“I can remember when I lived in Australia in the early 1980s having to wait up to two weeks for replies from the U.K. ”.. I remember a brief period in the mid to late 80s during the proto-internet days when email from one network to another could take 2 weeks or a few seconds. The weird thing was the recipient didn’t know it took 2 weeks, and might send a short response waiting for a reply.
gringo_gus - May 18, 2012 at 5:23 am
Here’s an exemplar of new modes of communication, which speaks to your own university, and your own authority to comment on, well, anything really. Put your own house in order, vice-chancellor Thrift:
http://www.ucu.org.uk/index.cfm?articleid=6084
Scroll down folks.
rorschach1984 - May 18, 2012 at 1:27 pm
gringo_gus is right. The regime in WBS is a stain on your reputation as a critical thinker and forward looking university leader. You have thrown the university to the sharks and sacrificed many cherished and valuable principles of academic life in the process. Readers, go to http://www.ucu.org.uk/index.cfm?articleid=6084 and offer words of solidarity. This cannot continue.
gavin_moodie - May 19, 2012 at 12:38 am
I have read the brief article and many of the posts on the web site that gringo_gus and rorschach1984 refer to. I don’t see their relevance to Thrift’s article not indeed to his performance as a vice chancellor.
Thrift is vice chancellor or president of the University of Warwick. The web site is of the University and College Union criticising the management of Warwick Business School. It seems that the new dean is planning changes, apparently to improves the school’s research performance, which may result in a number of academics and staff losing their jobs.
Most but by no means all of the comments on the web site are highly critical of the school’s new direction. Many criticise the dean’s policy implicitly, others explicitly. Some posters support the school’s strategy to various extents, but some with reservations about implementation.
In my view vice chancellors or presidents should give deans considerable discretion in how they manage their schools. Even the more egregious cases of poor strategy and implementation given by posters wouldn’t warrant a vice chancellor’s intervention in my view. However, if the school is still unsettled when the dean’s contract is up for renewal I would think the vc should take that into account in deciding whether to renew the dean’s contract.
Returning to the substance of Thrift’s post, I agree and suggest that his observation explains the importance of design as well as function and hence the stunning success of Apple.
gringo_gus - May 20, 2012 at 11:26 am
to reply to Gavin (kudos to whom for using a real name, I guess. I don’t have the courage). First, the column states:
“Or think of managing a university. That requires business cards, usually
in the language of the country you are visiting. In many countries it
requires a plethora of (small) gifts. It requires a flight case and
maybe a laptop bag. It requires the requisite amount of information
technology so as to be able to keep constantly in touch–I have a
Blackberry Torch welded to my person and I carry either an iPad or a Mac
book according to how long the trip will be and if I have to write
something, such as a blog. ”
So, Thrift adduces his standing as university manager to make comments about changes in media, and then goes on to talk about how he virtually manages his university. Yet, the data on the other website (a) challenge his claims to authority based on his managerial competence (b) undermine his argument about technological change enabling his university to be managed when he is at a distance.
Second, not only does the link I gave suggest that actually, the management of WBS is worse than egregious causing the school against which others benchmark themselves in the UK to implode (the situation for WBS is so bad, it would seem, that waiting for the end of the Dean’s term will be too late); but the postings thereon – both for and against the current Dean – are the like of something I have never seen before; and actually speak to the same theme that Thrift here pontificates upon – new forms of virtual communication. And what we see is immediate, and unmediated speaking from the heart to the world by angry Warwick Faculty. Business School Faculty, too, not the traditional campus radicals. Reputational damage is resulting. Go manage that, Nige. But, my recommendation – some face-to-face work is needed.
gringo_gus - May 20, 2012 at 3:08 pm
There is clearly something badly afoot now at Warwick. On the blog I first posted on, neoMcCarthyite accusations are being levelled at named junior faculty who are also union reps – repeated attribution of extremist political goals, including branding the one of them “Red Jimmy”. There also seems a concerted campaign to fill the blog with quasi spam – repeated nonsense messages, cutting and pasting huge amounts of texts.
Thrift must distance his university from this McCarthyism, which to any reader seems to be a thuggish response to disputes about points of fact, and indeed confirm that there is a real problem with the managerial style. Given the union reps have been named, and indeed responded, he has a duty to likewise identify and “out” the red-baiting faculty and administrators; or convince himself, and us, that it is non-Warwick related trolls.