The group show at pop-up exhibition The Glass Room, which includes !Mediengruppe Bitnik’s work Ashley Madison Angels at Work in London (2017), has been mentioned in a BBC article by their technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones.
In the Glass Room
By Rory Cellan-Jones
A newly refurbished shop unit in central London contains what at first glance is a trendy technology store. The walls are brilliant white, and glitzy tablet devices sit on pure white pedestals whose underlighting illuminates the freshly painted white floor.
There’s even a long bar where visitors can get advice from the staff. But this shop is not selling the latest tech gadgets. It’s an exhibition called The Glass Room, which aims to get people thinking about where they go and what they do online, and the data trail they leave in cyber-space.
I asked Stephanie Hankey, who curates the exhibition, what experience she wanted visitors to have. “I think we’re trying to get them to think about technology in a different way, to bring the issue they may have been thinking about themselves, to life,” she said. “It could be anything from feeling like you’re using technology too much and it’s invading your life, to having reasons for wanting to understand technology in a different way to the way it’s sold to us.”
I tried out a facial recognition system that attempted to match me to a database of faces from photo-sharing site Flickr. I must say I didn’t think the matches looked much like me, but Stephanie Hankey said that was part of the point of that exhibit. “Are they good enough yet? There have been lots of cases of misidentification of people and facial recognition is already being trialled, for example in the UK by the police.”