Vienna MMIX–10008/7000: Surveillance Panorama Project No. 4—The Vienna Opera Ball

Vienna MMIX–10008/7000 is the fourth work in Jules Spinatsch's Surveillance Panorama Project, a series begun in 2003 that uses networked surveillance-camera systems to record public events and expose the gap between social performance and social reality. For the 2009 Vienna Opera Ball, the Vienna State Opera ceded control of part of its own surveillance system to Spinatsch, who set two computer-controlled cameras rotating continuously in a grid, photographing the room roughly every three to four seconds from the moment the 7,000 guests entered at 20:32 until the ball ended at 05:10. The publication reproduces the resulting 10,008 images across a hardcover volume presenting them in chronological order, one minute of the ball per page, and a companion softcover volume of selected single frames, accompanied by a text booklet, all housed together in a slipcase, in an edition of 600 numbered copies. The British Journal of Photography described the resulting document as "an anthropological study in class constructed," reading the accumulated frames as a study of Viennese high society under its own cameras.