The Glass Room, was an exhibition from the Tactical Technology Collective which is a group of individuals who put together art pieces to demonstrate to the public the importance of Net Neutrality, but also to show the public the amount of the data that a normal person has had gathered on them.
When I first walked into the exhibition I was greeted with a layout very similar to an Apple store, white surfaces simple design, with each art piece being centred on a plinth or table. In the centre of the room there was a Data Detox Bar where people could go to find out and learn how much data is stored about them and how they can reduce their data foot print online.
The first art piece that I walked up to was “Forgot Your Password” by Aram Bartholl. This was the lost of the 4.6 million password that were leaked from linkedIn in 2012. I found it interesting as physical books show the shear volume of passwords that were leaked. When you hear a number like that thrown around it doesn’t mean very much, but when you can physically hold the books and see which passwords where leaked it shows you the scale of the leak. (I found an old password of mine) It was really interesting to see if your password is unique! I never thought I would find a password that I used from a site, that I didn’t use at the time of the leak.
I thought this illustrated very well the trust that user have to have when setting up an account with an online entity such as LinkedIn (especially important as LinkedIn Deals with people in business).
Another one of the pieces shows how businesses like google change their imaging that the present to the user through applications such as Google Maps, and Apple Maps. This is really interesting because it warps the way that we can see what is on our planet. “Reconnaissance” by Ingrid Burrington shows the before and after pictures of sites that have been erased from Google Maps. This is interesting because they remove sites that government organisations want them to remove. This means that we have to put trust in google to do the right thing, allowing them to discriminate between different governments.
This is especially important when considering does the US have as much right as the UAE to remove sites from Google Maps. I guess this depends on where you stand politically. I though the use of the overlaid images which can be viewed from different angles to show the sites in different states.
The image below shows me using the facial recognition to find matching images on the Flickr database. according to the staff at the exhibition it has found some 100% matches of people who regularly upload images to Flickr of themselves.
Photo Credit: John Fass
This was in my opinion the piece which had most merit as it was easily interactive and demonstrated well the power of facial recognition software today. It made me think of the way casinos use this software to spot cheaters/ people who are winning to much. The power of their system is astounding if you get banned in Vegas you can’t gamble in Macau.
Link to The Glass Room Website:
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