Creative Tech Week

Beautiful Interfaces: The privacy paradox is a new media art exhibition curated by Helena Acosta and Miyö Van Stenis, accessible via a wireless network from hacked wifi routers, which are not connected to the Internet. Each router has a private network which the visitor must connect to on their own devices, cell phones or ipads, in order to view the exhibition. The show explores the concept of privacy versus self­-exposure, through a platform that allows distribution and creates content in a more independent and anonymous way. In the era of algorithm prediction, all our online actions have a digital trace, used by companies and governments to predict our behaviors. The internet's purpose in the media is to collect and quantify each action for surveillance. The exhibition wants to propose answers about dichotomous situations between private and public. The exhibition is a decentralized network to show and distribute new media art, a virtual island on the web composed for a platform of 5 private networks. Daily ordinary online social practices, could look like harmless actions through a naive eye, but contain the potential for unexpected consequences, when they are traced and connected by algorithmic surveillance systems. In less than 5 years facial recognition algorithms will be ubiquitous. Recently Facebook added facial recognition technology to their platform to allow themselves to be more deeply integrated into our smartphones. These new developments will allow easy reconstruction of any random encounter we have on the street that has been captured by a camera. Given this insertion into our social communication practices on the Social Web and hence increasing disclosure of personal information online, the 'privacy paradox' suggests that despite Internet users' concerns about privacy, their behaviors do not reflect those concerns. Artists: La Turbo Avedon Carla Gannis Heather Dewey Hagborg Jennifer Lyn Morone Annie Rose Malamet