Graeme Arnfield is an artist, filmmaker, curator and composer from the UK, currently based in London. He creates essay films from networked imagery and mainly engages with themes of spectatorship, storytelling and the politics of the digital. In Home Invasion, Arnfield explores the history of the doorbell from its first appearance to the market to the digital turns that it has taken over the years, up to its controversial relationship to today’s surveillance culture.

This essay film is made purely out of found footage, digital sketches and uncanny music. It includes a combination of doorbell fish-eye footage ranging from delivery packages arrivals, to intruders trying to break in, to animals passing by. The different clips reveal the stories of how the doorbell camera and the “Ring” company came about and how they eventually got used against their own purpose as well as to how they are depicted in home invasion cinema and horror films.

Fun and scary at times, Home Invasion presents the downsides to how the data recorded on such surveillance systems can be maliciously used by tech companies. Arnfield also explores the racist and classist implications tied to domestic surveillance footage as well as the contrast between the right to home security, and data control and extraction.