This episode, Privacy Techtonics, is curated by Candice Jacobs with Dr. Philippa Williams & Dr. Lipika Kamra, academics from Queen Mary University of London whose research focuses on how ‘privacy’ is designed, talked about, regulated and experienced by WhatsApp/Meta, governments and ordinary people and is the subject of their next book 'Privacy Techtonics: Digital Geopolitics, WhatsApp and India'.

The exhibition will showcase artists & multimedia artworks, film screenings, podcasts and an exhibition PDF with artist interviews and commissioned texts. Together they explore the intrinsic and unequal relations between data, technology and people to provoke questions about our digital lives and futures, how sustainable or desirable they are and what alternative worlds we might want or need to create.

Over four weeks, four different artworks & artists or "scenes" will take over Broadway Gallery. Each scene comprises a series of storylines and conversations that explore the relationships between digital technologies, data, identity, people, power and privacy. Online works will contribute towards the conversations of each scene and will be live every Friday.

Privacy Techtonics is funded by the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Collaboration and Strategic Impact Fund, Queen Mary University of London 2021/2.

Each artist's work presented within Broadway Gallery will be exhibited on different iterations of Framework for Practice, a temporary, modular, adaptable scaffolding structure by visual artist/curator Ryan Boultbee and architectural designer/artist William Harvey. Four artworks from further artists will be presented online.

Black Box (2018) sees Tara Kelton interviewing Uber drivers in Bangalore, asking them to describe the company they work for (where they imagine what Uber is, what it looks like, who runs it, etc.) Using their responses as visual cues, Kelton commissioned local photography studios to produce representations from their existing image banks.

The resulting images reflect the gaps between the lived reality of Uber’s employees and their imagined ideas of who Uber is and what it does; to reveal a spatial and racial dissonance between Indian Uber drivers and the portrayal of largely white, western figures and settings that they feel represent Uber. Black Box speaks to the opacity, obfuscation and secrecy that surrounds Big Tech’s collection of data and how data relations between workers and platforms are normalised for corporate profit.

Enter Platform Sweet Talk (2021), Ben Grosser’s analysis of the grammar used in messages on social media to investigate how their structure influences the users’ behaviour. According to Ben: To exist in the digital is to be in “conversation” with notifications.

The artist has devised a unique interface that presents the messages in a depersonalised form, highlighting the statements as empty carriers of our data, which are used against us to maximise our engagement online. Platform Sweet Talk reflects Grosser’s characteristic method to make the normal look strange, and in this case, surface the power of software design and confront our unequal relations with data.

Platform Sweet Talk was commissioned by arebyte Gallery, London, UK.

A global investigation by Turner Prize nominees Forensic Architecture with support from Amnesty International and The Citizen Lab. It examines the cyber-weapons manufacturer NSO Group and its malware Pegasus, a piece of “security” software sold to governments across the world. Pegasus can enable its operators to infiltrate phones, access personal and location data and surreptitiously control a device’s microphone and camera. In this scene we bear witness to some of 'The Pegasus Stories'; video testimonials - narrated by renowned whistleblower Edward Snowden - of human rights activists whose privacy has been invaded with Pegasus. A sense of the pervasive application of Pegasus by surveillance states is heightened by an accompanying data sonification, a collaboration with renowned musician and producer Brian Eno.

1014 (2015) gives us a tour of Room 1014 in the Mira hotel, Hong Kong that was occupied by the whistleblower turned privacy activist Edward Snowden immediately following his departure from the US in 2013, and from where the Guardian first revealed his identity to the world. The artist, Yuri Pattison, created the film work 2 years after the event, intrigued by the transformation of this story into a revered Hollywood film. Pattison’s film returns to the hotel location like one might make a pilgrimage to a movie location.

1014 is lightly annotated with diagrams and text elements borrowed from the NSA and GCHQ documents that were leaked by Snowden, while also drawing from English translations of Chinese netizen slang. These annotated elements were then flattened by processing them with the anonymity tool, Anonymouth. The artist’s source videos are now hosted on a domain that was once controlled by Snowden when he was a teenager.