Artist Recalls Store Photo Project & Reactions

One year after the U.S. Secret Service knocked his door and confiscated his computer gear, New York City artist Kyle McDonald is explaining how his project to capture candid photos from Apple store computers went awry. In a long story on Wired.com, McDonald says he’s still nervous when someone knocks on his front door. But he cites the project as one of his most successful, partly because of the photos themselves, but more for Apple’s legal reaction and the thousands of reader comments that it generated. In early 2011 McDonald had been exploring what he calls “computer-mediated interactions,” and decided to use Apple store visitors and employees as subjects. He visited the West 14th Street(NYC) Apple store and surreptitiously installed a small software program on several display computers. The software periodically captured photos using the computers’ cameras, and uploaded them to McDonald’s computer via the Internet. From that collection of photos, he created a Tumblr Web page—and caught the eye of Apple. The company dispatched take-down orders to Tumblr and alerted the Secret Service, whose criminal investigation of federal law violations ended without any charges. In the end, McDonald writes on Wired, “If Apple hadn’t so vehemently condemned the piece, it would have been resigned to live as just another quick… project.” But because Apple ordered the photos be taken offline and complained to the Secret Service, the project received much more attention. “Apple created an amazing discussion I never could have planned,” McDonald says. “In a way it became Apple’s work. But most importantly, it became the commenters’.”