Chicago is launching a creepy new campaign to blanket the mega-city in more surveillance through its Array of Things, creating a network of (at least) 500 sensors devices that will be shared in a growing Big Data cloud.

As The Chicago Tribune reports:.

The first of a network of data-collecting sensors that could one day blanket Chicago are now live.

The city installed two nodes containing computers and sensors including low-resolution cameras as well as air quality sensors last week. They went up on traffic light poles at Damen and Archer avenues in the McKinley Park neighborhood on the Southwest Side and Damen and Cermak Road in the Heart of Chicago on the Lower West Side. The installation marks the launch of the Array of Things project, which was conceived in 2012 and originally slated to start in mid-2014.

The project is a collaboration between the University of Chicago, Argonne National Laboratory and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. AT&T is the internet provider for the project, which is backed by a $3.1 million grant from the National Science Foundation.