Teacher to implant camera in his head

The Wall Street Journal reported that Wafaa Bilal, an Iraqi assistant professor in the photography and imaging department of the university's Tisch School of the Arts, will have a camera surgically implanted in his head.

For a year the camera will take still pictures every minute and feed the photos to monitors at a new museum in Qatar.

Colleagues said the camera would be affixed to his head through a piercing-like attachment. Bilal has declined to comment on the project.

The artwork, "The 3rd I," is meant to be "a comment on the inaccessibility of time, and the inability to capture memory and experience," according to the Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art. The show is expected to open next month.

The Journal reported that the project opened up privacy issues in regards to his students and their rights in the classroom. Fred Ritchin, associate chairman of the department, said having students "under the burden of constant surveillance" is "not a good teaching environment.

University officials are working on developing rules for the project while the professor has agreed to cover the lens while on campus.

Bilal's past projects have included 2007's "Domestic Tension," originally titled "Shoot an Iraqi." He spent a month in a Chicago gallery and let members of the public shoot paintball at him day and night.

The Wall Street Journal said that for his 2008 project, "Virtual Jihadi," he hacked a video game and inserted an avatar of himself as a suicide-bomber hunting President George W. Bush. Protests, both for and against it, followed.

A post on his website described a project earlier this year in which Bilal turned his body into a canvas, having his back tattoed with a borderless map of Iraq covered with a dot for each Iraqi and American casualty near the cities where they died.

The 5,000 dead American soldiers were represented by red dots and the 100,000 Iraqi casualties were represented by dots of green UV ink that is seemingly invisible unless under black light.

The names of the dead were read by people during the performance. Bilal's blog said that among them is his brother Haji, who was killed by a missile at a checkpoint in their hometown of Kufa in 2004. The blog stated that the "deaths of Iraqis like his brother are largely invisible to the American public."

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