Don't lose your mind

"Bamboo curtain"

The Bamboo Curtain was a Cold War-era political and ideological boundary separating the communist states of East Asia from non-communist nations. (Source: Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0)

About this project

Bamboo Shelter is an interactive installation that explores themes of online surveillance, information censorship, and how large technology corporations capture and leverage user privacy.

Set up during final examination week, the installation invited students and visitors to enter the shelter, browse the internet, and freely engage with the space.

Interaction components

Censorship and privacy intrusion are global issues. We aimed to:

- Help visitors recognize the critical importance of digital privacy;
- Visually demonstrate how censorship compromises intellectual freedom;
- Engage the audience interactively rather than preaching.

Mechanical Integration

Interaction flow

Technical implementation

When a visitor enters our custom-built wooden shelter, they sit at a desktop computer to access the web. Unknown to them, I constructed a passive monitoring and redirection system composed of two parts:

1. **Webcam Surveillance**: Uses a local zoneminder stack streaming via webrtc to broadcast the visitor's real-time facial expressions and physical reactions onto spectating screens outside.

2. **Browser Redirection & Interception**: Leverages iptables on a custom Linux gateway to selectively block target websites and redirect requests to a localized introduction portal. A companion browser extension takes automated screen captures, streaming them back to a central server to display the visitor's browsing activity.

Introduction landing portal displaying webcam feeds and captured browser activity

Interior of the wooden shelter

The shelter

We constructed a standalone physical wooden booth to provide an enclosed, private browsing environment. The hidden webcam, customized router, and terminal computer form the interactive core. On the exterior facade, a large display screen reveals the occupant's real-time actions and expressions to outside spectators.

The completed wooden shelter and the external display for spectators

Exterior view of the installation

Discovering that one is being actively monitored often triggers immediate feelings of discomfort, annoyance, or mild shock.

However, once visitors step outside and realize this is a controlled interactive art installation, those initial negative feelings shift toward reflection. Experiencing this vulnerability firsthand helps build deep, lasting empathy for millions of people worldwide who endure invasive digital surveillance and censorship daily.

Through this shift, a temporarily jarring experience is transformed into an impactful, positive lesson in digital literacy.