"I like the idea of letting go of control. Of creating a toy, throwing it in a room, and letting the kids play with it," said Davis. "Before I was interested more in interactive stuff, in user input. This is kind of a next step for me. Here the data is playing within the boundaries, rather than the people."

"Carnivore" is doing more than pushing art theory bounds. Like its federal namesake, the Carnivore art project has generated controversy. Princeton authorities were, at first, reluctant to connect it to their computers.

"One could hardly imagine a university welcoming a sniffer onto its network," said Tom Levin, the Princeton professor curating the surveillance exhibition. "It would’ve opened a window through which every hacker student would’ve jumped."

In order to make "Carnivore" palatable, university geeks created a subnet for the project, in which only packets from computers in the exhibition would be sniffed.

"It provides a kind of data apartheid so that no one on the network will feel compromised," Levin said.

The Princeton show is the outgrowth of a larger surveillance exhibition that Levin curated at the ZKM, the German new media arts center. Several of the works displayed at the ZKM will also come to Princeton, including the New York Surveillance Camera Project.

German audiences will get to see "Carnivore" in February, when it shows at the Transmediale in Berlin. From there, it moves to Illinois State University’s Bloomington campus, and then to New York City’s New Museum in May.