Smithsonian Magazine: “It’s an increasingly common sight on vacation, particularly in tourist destinations: An influencer sets up in front of a popular local landmark, sometimes even using props (coffee, beer, pets) or changing outfits, as a photographer or self-timed camera snaps away. Others are milling around, sometimes watching. But often, unbeknownst to everyone involved, another device is also recording the scene: a surveillance camera. Belgian artist Dries Depoorter is exploring this dynamic in his controversial new online exhibit, The Followers, which he unveiled last week. The art project places static Instagram images side-by-side with video from surveillance cameras, which recorded footage of the photoshoot in question. To make The Followers, Depoorter started with EarthCam, a network of publicly accessible webcams around the world, to record a month’s worth of footage in tourist attractions like New York City’s Times Square and Dublin’s Temple Bar Pub. Then he enlisted an artificial intelligence (A.I.) bot, which scraped public Instagram photos taken in those locations, and facial-recognition software, which paired the Instagram images with the real-time surveillance footage. Depoorter calls himself a “surveillance artist”…