The Follower was created as part of Code.lab project, which was also part of the bigger realm, the CODE: Live (Cultural Olympiad) exhibition during the Olympic Games. Code.lab was a collaborative project between two artists, Simon M. Levin and Jer Thorp, and art students. Code.lab's concept was to question the relationship between observer and observed in the most documented tourist place in Vancouver.

During the Olympic Games, Granville Island was filled with people who came from different places for the occasion. Among the crowd, The Follower, a machine that moved unsteadily along the historic railway tracks, recorded the island through its embedded surveillance camera capturing the rear view while it moved forward. The railway tracks are now leveled with the pavement and serve no function, but they are a reminder of Granville Island’s industrial history. The island was once developed specifically for industrial factories, such as machine shops, foundries, and equipment manufacturers. Rail cars served as a main system for transporting manufactured products to markets outside of the island. But such history may not be so evident to the visitors, and The Follower may be seen as only something to stumble over, but that then might reveal the tracks under our feet.

While The follower moved forward by searching the tracks, it disrupted the flow of the traffic and caught many people’s attention with its noise of a tin can that was dragged behind. Soon or later, people started to follow and pulled out their cameras and cell phones to record the follower. The images from the follower’s surveillance camera were sent wirelessly and were projected inside the Code.lab exhibition space. Some people noticed that they were surveyed by the camera right away and some did not know until they saw images of themselves in the exhibition space.