Decentralized Intelligence Agency 01

A face set into old plaster, watching from above with the tired authority of ornament that has outlived several regimes.

Another lodged higher up in a cracked facade, still performing its decorative duty long after anyone could reasonably be expected to notice.

And then, at street level, two hand-drawn squashes behind a metal grille, looking less like produce and more like local informants waiting to be debriefed - and debriefing each other while waiting.

None of these things was meant to belong to the same system. And yet they do. Together they suggest a scattered, low-budget network of observers: improvised, persistent, faintly absurd, and entirely adequate to the neighborhood they serve. And still more competent and less harmful than all the modern ones put together.

These three images are small fragments from that distributed apparatus: the city keeping an eye on itself through whatever faces it happens to have available.