Some students joke that their teachers have eyes in the backs of their heads. A New York University professor is now closer to that reality, having had a camera surgically implanted into the back of his cranium. Wafaa Bilal, an Iraqi born photography professor at the university’s Tisch School of the Arts, had the procedure done at a piercing studio last month for an art project commissioned by a museum in Doha, Qatar, he said. “This will expose the unspoken conditions we face,” Bilal said Thursday. “A project like this is meant to establish a dialogue about surveillance.” The project is called “The 3rd I,” and will make use of the posterior camera by taking a snap-shot photographs each minute of Bilal’s everyday activities for one year, he said. The images will then be transmitted to Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, he said, featuring an exhibit entitled “Told/Untold/Retold” in time for the museum’s December 30 opening, according to a museum statement. The thumb-sized camera is mounted on a titanium plate inserted inside the back of his head, Bilal said. A cable runs from the camera to a computer that he carries in a custom-made shoulder bag, providing a real-time global positioning signal of his location.
