Auckland Museum
Tāmaki Herenga Waka: Stories of Auckland is exhibiting a confronting interactive experience in a research collaboration with UoA academics. Eyes on Tāmaki is displayed in a dark room, filled with screens and projections that create new lenses to examine our city by. The exhibition seeks to inform visitors about data surveillance and facial recognition as technologies that affect our everyday lives.
On one side of the room is an enlarged phone touch screen, where you submit your own concerns about facial recognition, and learn how fun, playful apps are also a part of data creating and collection. This interactive is initially intriguing, but the final effect is confronting—there’s something about seeing your own image next to explanations about exploited privacy that highlights the issues at hand. A larger projection of changing colourful and animated data representations create wide-ranging depictions of Tāmaki Makaurau, in ways that are moving and sometimes disturbing.
One of the more exciting aspects of Eyes on Tāmaki is that the work is ongoing. You can follow the research @eyesontamaki on Twitter, and stay informed about the quickly changing shape of data surveillance in our city.
A persuasive wake-up call about our (lack of) privacy.