Dear David, Spying in the City: You Art in Time Square!

OONA, the bride-to-be, celebrates her bachelorette weekend in New York City under the unblinking eye of the NYC Department of Transportation's traffic camera network. Continuing the surveillance-love-story series Dear David, this performance stages the penultimate chapter in a story that began in 2019 between OONA and David, the TfL CCTV Data Manager who serves as the proxy through which she interrogates the surveillance state. Traveling by limousine across the city, OONA allows her celebration to be captured, frame by frame, by the same infrastructure of municipal looking that has long defined her relationship to visibility. What might elsewhere be an act of privacy, a bride's final unmarried night, becomes instead an offering: OONA surrenders her bachelorette to the city's gaze, extending David's reach across an ocean and folding New York's optics into the architecture of their coming wedding. The work asks what it means to be "seen" by an apparatus mistaken for intimacy, and to celebrate freedom inside a system built to track it. As with the wider Dear David project, OONA positions herself not as a woman evading surveillance but as one already embedded to it. The bachelorette becomes a penultimate love letter, written not in ink but in timestamped, geotagged footage, addressed to David and delivered ahead of the true and final vow: the public wedding in London this October.