Julia Weist, Self Portrait, 2023. 

Watching the Watcher

On Julia Weist’s Surveillance Art. 

By Bennett Rowe

3.30.26

Last summer, I attended a talk by the Upstate New York-based artist Julia Weist at The Center for Photography at Woodstock. I was interning in the Hudson Valley for the summer and, with no schoolwork to keep me occupied, I often found myself at any art-related talk, opening, or exhibition I could find. I had followed Weist’s work for some time and was elated to be in a crowd of artists eager to learn about her invigorating process. 

Many works in Weist’s array of projects are connected via a common thread she calls “system aesthetics”: consider the 2015 project, Reach, in which she sought out and then advertised a word (parbunkells) that had never been used on the Internet before, or when, in 2020, the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs and the Department of Records and Information Services commissioned her to create a series of artworks that engaged records from their vast collection dating back to the early 17th century.

In 2022, Weist upped the ante on her investigative practice by applying to become a private investigator. The first hurdle in her application was the fact that she had not been a police officer or Fire Marshal for 20 years, as is required by the State of New York. What Weist did have, however, was experience as an investigator—the vague qualifier on an application to be a private investigator stipulates that applicants should “have either 3 years’ experience or 3 years equivalent position.”

To her surprise, Weist’s application was accepted, and through access to IRBsearch, a database for “investigative professionals,” she began work on a self-portrait of sorts, a collage of any information she could find on herself. She was able to find information ranging from every address she had lived at to the paystubs of her work-study job in college. Among the data resulting from her search, she found images of places her car had been: at a stop sign, parked on the street, or driving on the road.

During the talk I attended, Weist brought up the question: how public is public? She acknowledged that, yes, when you’re walking on the sidewalk or driving your car down a public road, you understand that you may be seen by any other member of the public. But what if that information is taken and stored for investigators, law enforcement, and even artists with access to analyze at any time? While Weist’s work doesn’t provide an answer to this tricky question, it allows the viewer to participate in the very surveillance it critiques.

All of the images Weist found of her car had likely been captured by a Motorola L5M Mobile LPR Camera, a license plate recognition device mounted on top of police cruisers and tow trucks. For tow truck operators, these cameras serve a dual purpose: they can alert the driver of vehicles that are wanted by the bank for repossession, and Motorola pays monthly incentives to drivers whose cameras scan high volumes of license plates. The cameras instantly upload these images, along with their associated metadata, to Motorola’s database, which users can access through platforms such as IRBsearch.

Julia Weist, Dream Believe Achieve, Believe There is Good in the World, Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and Thou Shalt be Saved, Christmas Believe, Believe Pest Control, Believe People Will Never Forget, Believe Doubt, Believe, I Believe, We Believe, In this House We Believe, Believe, Believe, We Believe Black Lives Matter, Believe, 2024.

What Weist quickly learned was that these cameras do not just scan license plates—they can read. This meant that she could search for a word and receive thousands of images containing that word. In the case of the 2024 piece, Dream Believe Achieve…, the artist searched for the word “believe” and received images of lawn signs, bumper stickers, articles of clothing, and, of course, license plates that all contained the word “believe.” She then placed these images over satellite imagery of the locations where they were captured, resulting in an anonymous yet recognizable image of American sprawl. We don’t know the identities of the vehicles’ owners, but we do gather their information: their political affiliations, religious beliefs, and senses of humor, all juxtaposed against images of the impersonal concrete of American infrastructure. Streets and buildings seem to play with one another across time and place, lending to the feeling that in Weist’s kaleidoscopic world, one could make a right turn in Michigan and end up in a Phoenix suburb.

In addition to searching the database for specific words, Weist played with creating staged scenes for the roving tow truck cameras to capture. To make 2023’s Self Portrait, Weist explained, she sat near a tow lot and simply waited for a truck equipped with license plate-running cameras. She later accessed Motorola’s database, searched the license plate number of the car she sat next to, and sifted through the results to find her image. Although the camera’s “job” is to scan licence plates, it inevitably also captures the life that unfolds around them.

As Weist continued to work on her Vehicle Sightings series, she gained a particular interest in the self-referential scenarios arising when tow trucks captured images of fellow tow trucks or the operators of the vehicles themselves. By sifting through images that contained the license plates ending with TT, which signifies that the vehicle is a tow truck in New York, Weist located an intriguing series of images where tow trucks’ cameras captured images of their own drivers, as well as the drivers of other tow trucks. In this series within a series, the banal is prized: a tipped-over traffic cone, the back of a driver’s sweatshirt, a Christmas wreath encircling the Ford logo, and a driver on his back fixing a car part.

Julia Weist, Watching The Watcher (They Have License Plates Too, 24891 TT), 2024.

While tow trucks might not be the biggest player in the crafting of an American surveillance state, their participation in Motorola’s data networks illustrates how surveillance technology has infiltrated nearly every aspect of American life. Weist’s investigation into what these systems are capable of through her privileged access as a PI allows the viewer to gain awareness of, and even participate in, these complex systems. Although some months have passed since I attended Weist’s talk, daily life continually reminds me of her work and its implications. When I drive, I am more aware of the personal information that can be gathered from our cars and am on the lookout to spot these cameras in action. The other day, while walking in my small college town, I noticed that the village police department’s cruiser vehicle was equipped with a similar camera and became aware that my image, along with any license plates nearby, would be recorded, stored, and sent to a database somewhere. I am also aware that there is nothing I can do to guard myself against this technology and its uses entirely. Unlike at the airport, where one can opt out of the TSA’s facial recognition technology, Weist writes in an op-ed for the Albany Times Union that “these systems present no way to opt out of data collection unless one stops driving in public, which is, of course, impossible for most Americans.”

While we can acknowledge our inability to opt out of this technology, Weist’s Vehicle Sightings series does what excellent art should do: it makes the viewer rethink the familiar, or at least become aware of a new problem or concept. Since attending Weist’s talk, I find that I am growing more interested in “watching the watcher,” or ways that citizens can create their own networks to protect themselves from harm, such as the people of Minneapolis who recently created their own ICE lookout channels. This level of vigilance we must have against systems that mask as public safety measures is sobering, but as Weist shows us, there is great need for people who watch back (artistically or otherwise) when mass surveillance operates in plain sight.