Suicide Box

There is an exhilarating horrible immediacy about the Bureau of inverse Technology's Suicide Box. Formed in Melbourne in 1992, incorporated in Delaware, USA in 1997, but now based in cities across the Northern Hemisphere, the Bureau are a covert action data collection agency for the information age. With Suicide Box, the audience becomes part of a data retrieval exercise witnessing footage collected by a camera installed on the Golden Gate Bridge to record the frequently occurring suicides from this famous landmark. Video surveillance footage, snatches of indecipherable information relayed by the crisis call operators and the murky footage witnessed contribute to an overall sense of danger and tragedy. BIT are offering us a bleak canvas peppered with unnerving statistics as text and image combine in a commentary on the explosion of electronic monitoring. As viewers, we are reminded that we are tacitly all voyeurs in the ignoble tradition of trashy American real life television.