{"id":1564,"date":"2013-02-16T20:38:50","date_gmt":"2013-02-17T03:38:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jamescoupe.com\/?page_id=1564"},"modified":"2013-02-16T20:42:11","modified_gmt":"2013-02-17T03:42:11","slug":"1564-2","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/jamescoupe.com\/?page_id=1564","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

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Parsons Exhibit Displays State of Online Privacy<\/strong><\/span>
\nNiko Nelson<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

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Credit: Niko Nelson<\/p><\/div>\n

A crowded venue full of free wine, artists and their respective works should evoke openness, not paranoia. But at the Sheila Johnson Design Center last Wednesday night, \u201cThe Public Private\u201d exhibit stressed the opposite message: the world is no longer as intimate as it once was.<\/p>\n

Personnel from Parsons hosted an opening reception for \u201cThe Public Private\u201d at Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, where technologically bent artists from various genres showcased expos\u00e9s on this age of social media domination and its potentially detrimental effects.<\/p>\n

Re-watching movies like \u201cEnemy of the State\u201d and \u201cLive Free or Die Hard\u201d evoke chilling feelings of a new reality: a world under constant surveillance by its own inhabitants. Pictures are taken, words are said; they may get lost in our memory. But once online, these actions cannot be undone.<\/p>\n

Italian-born artist Paolo Cirio scrutinized this concept of Internet exclusivity at \u201cThe Public Private\u201d with his piece \u201cFace to Facebook.\u201d The two-year project involved snatching photos from roughly a million random Facebook users and uploading them to a fake dating website. Once news of this project went viral, a mixed response of outrage and pleasure ensued, and the dating website went offline.<\/p>\n

\u201cEveryday we could get like 20 emails from people really pissed,\u201d Cirio said. \u201cAll these lawyers of Facebook were insisting [that we] shut down the entire project.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like his lawyers, Cirio knew that collecting and using publicly available data violated no one\u2019s rights.<\/p>\n

Many of today\u2019s Internet users leave behind long trails of data. Recognizing the human discomfort with public surveillance, artist James Coupe displayed the mix of surveillance and social media in his \u201cFive People in a Room<\/a>\u201d project.<\/p>\n

Coupe\u2019s exhibit incorporated a ring of cameras capturing a 360-degree panorama. Each camera feed is set to one of five monitors exposing the entire gallery space. Running on computer vision, the cameras pick out when single faces are in the shot, then profiles the faces according to age and gender. Facebook status updates from users matching the profile are then shown as subtitles under the person as they appear on the screen.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe five subtitles [across five screens] read as a story, so each person coming in changes the whole story,\u201d Coupe explained. \u201cPeople don\u2019t often think about [Facebook] as a surveillance space,\u201d Coupe said. \u201cEverybody is volunteering all this information about themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n

We can no longer become antagonistic or hostile when someone makes use of the information we unintentionally give them access to online. Although Coupe believes people are now \u201clearning through social media how to control how they are seen,\u201d commercial systems \u2013 like Facebook and cloud service providers \u2013 are allowed to decide what \u201cbeing seen\u201d actually means.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\"\"<\/a>

Parsons Exhibit Displays State of Online Privacy Niko Nelson A crowded venue full of free wine, artists and their respective works should evoke openness, not paranoia. But at the Sheila Johnson Design Center last Wednesday night, \u201cThe Public Private\u201d exhibit stressed the opposite message: the world is no longer as intimate as it once was. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1564","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/jamescoupe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1564","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/jamescoupe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/jamescoupe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jamescoupe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jamescoupe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1564"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"http:\/\/jamescoupe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1564\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1578,"href":"http:\/\/jamescoupe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1564\/revisions\/1578"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/jamescoupe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1564"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}