San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
BEHIND THE DIGITAL DOOR
Exhibition lifts the veil on online privacy, data
White walls, clean lines and flat screens — a new art and technology exhibition in downtown San Francisco mimics perfectly the ubiquitous form of so many technology stores. Though not their function. If an Apple store is designed to sell swipeable phones and neverending applications for all our daily needs, “The Glass Room” exists to complicate that sleek simplicity.
Through 50 pieces of artwork, the exhibition (at 838 Market St. through Nov. 3), explores invisible labor, mass surveillance and fleeting digital privacy.
There’s a multivolume compendium of the many passwords claimed in one online leak, a digital choreography of the thousands of movements that go into crafting tablets and smartphones, a small, blue metal box (that looks like a parking voucher machine) selling “likes” and followers by the hundreds. And in the very back, rather than a Genius Bar, there is a Data Detox Bar, where attendants dressed in white can assist in increasing privacy settings and help “enhance your digital wellbeing.”
It’s tempting to imagine this as “Black Mirror” — the dystopian Netflix series about our relationship with technology — made manifest. That’s a little too easy, though. In part because nothing in “The Glass Room” predicts the future (the artists engage with the here and now), but also because the exhibit charts a nuanced path.
Provocations are everywhere, but the intent is to provoke a deeper understanding and not to shock for shock’s sake, says Stephanie Hankey, a cocreator of the exhibit and the executive director of Tactical Tech. The hope, she says, is that “abstract ideas come to life.”
Tactical Tech, a Berlin NGO that exists to explore these broader issues, curated the show, which is free and open to the public, with the backing of Firefox and its parent company, the nonprofit Mozilla. The San Francisco exhibition is the fourth iteration of “The Glass Room.” Others have appeared in New York, Berlin and London, though each is different. Hankey estimates about 60% of the works are new.
“We always had it in mind to bring it to San Francisco,” Hankey says. “Now was a good time. There’s enough reflection and interest in the Bay Area amongst tech companies and tech workers.
“You can’t avoid these questions.”
The exhibition is split into four main areas of focus, with deep dives into surveillance, invisible labor, personal data and the growing influence of and resistance to the Big Five: Apple, Alphabet (Google), Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon.
A section called Big Mother delves into the way Big Brotherstyle surveillance is often repackaged as a way to stay safe. One tablet features a video advertisement that monitors the elderly. So precise are the program’s algorithms that it can discern whether somebody has fallen or simply reclined on a couch.
Nearby, “The Border Interfaced” by Joana Moll, shows footage from the Texas Virtual BorderWatch, a partnership between the state of Texas and tech startup BlueServo in which volunteers were invited to monitor the livestreams of 200 border cameras and report suspicious behavior. More than 200,000 users logged on. Another piece plays with the idea of predictive policing systems, mapping hot spots of whitecollar crime, rather than the usual property and violent crime.
The exhibition is at its most effective, though, when it implicates or involves the audience.
In “5000times,” artist Kiki Mager used footage from manufacturing facilities for tablets and smartphones to map “the hand movements that workers perform thousands of times a day during the assembly process.” The result is mesmerizing video of digital hands performing an unchanging dance against a black background. She pairs this with three physical sculptures that reveal the sheer number of times these tasks are performed — one made of 2,160 drops of soldering, one of 3,927 pieces of Kapton tape and one made of 2,541 piece of foil for screen protection.
Artist Manuel Beltrán explores digital labor rather than the physical. His piece, “Data Production Labor,” asks users to open a social media application and then lay it down so that the camera can monitor it as you scroll through and tap. At the same time, another camera monitors your face. The software collects usage data and emotional response information. After two minutes, it calculates what that information might be worth.
So often, Beltrán says, we’re made to think of these products as free services when, in fact, we’re the ones providing the service. As automation becomes de facto, we may need to ask for compensation.
The section that explores personal data asks all the expected questions but offers some surprises for even the most jaded viewer. With Adam Harvey’s “MegaPixels: Face Search,” viewers can submit to a face scan to find out if theirs is among the millions of images pulled from Flickr, YouTube and Instagram used to train facial recognition algorithms. And with Marc DaCosta’s “Clear ID,” visitors can scan the bar code on their driver’s license to see the information buried within — your name, your birthdate, your eye color and height and on and on. The computer then offers the chance to limit that information by printing a new bar code.
The idea for the piece came to DaCosta after he’d visited a bar with friends and noticed the bouncer scanning IDs and then referring to a phone app. “I kept asking about the apps he was using and what was going on and became just really intrigued when he showed me,” DaCosta says. Bars collect the data using apps. They can monitor the gender ratio of patrons and use the codes to create an industrywide database of blacklisted customers. Letting people print a new bar code, he says, is a way to “challenge whoever is interacting with the piece to think about what it would mean if you could be more intentional about the identities that you share in certain circumstances.”
Not all of the exhibits are on screens. Others, like the large collection of passwords skimmed from LinkedIn in 2012, or another similarly large collection of blacklisted websites, take the opposite approach, by making the digital very, very tangible.
In truth, though, that’s what the entire exhibition does. More and more we exist in two worlds at once, the physical and the digital. It’s easy to forget the latter — out of sight, out of mind. “The Glass Room” pushes us to see it.