Report by Erik Borra
The Transito Festival kicked off on Thursday 26 October with an event titled Paraplay. The evening was intended to be a playful awareness raising program about databodies, i.e. your digital identities. The setting was the Amsterdam pop temple Paradiso, capable of holding 1500 people. Unfortunately, only 300 people attended, almost all of which were already familiar with the new media communities and the use and implications of data bodies. However, the organizers had booked some thought-provoking acts.
Dat-A provided transmitters designed to track persons’ movements throughout the Paradiso and their interactions with others wearing a transmitter. Two screens displayed the location and a log of each person with a transmitter. This resulted in a very nice simulation of real life tracking and polling, such as possible with mobile phones or embedded GPS devices. The simulation was visually quite strong; with a little effort you could find yourself and your friends on screen in one of the Paradiso rooms. Unfortunately the tracking devices were not accurate (every receiver could only poll 16 users while there were at least 100 active [1]). For the simulation to give a lasting impression the polling should be fine-tuned. My recorded time at any place just was not right. Better profiles should also be made of the collected data. Conclusions like “There’s you, then there’s Tom Cruise” and “You looked mostly at the Mickey Mouse photos” — when there weren’t any — convey the wrong conclusion: “I may be tracked, but so what? It doesn’t say anything about me.”
Pictures by Anne Helmond.
In the same room, only separated by a curtain, the Orchestra of Anxiety set up its razor blades’ harp which could be played with Edward Scissorhands kinda gloves. The sound of barking dogs and shots of rebelling kids recorded by surveillance cameras may be triggered by the harp. Every visitor could play the harp, but that turned out to be quite tricky. Although it is quite impressive to see giant dogs barking at you, the cacophony was so overwhelming that is was impossible to stay in the room for too long. Once again however, the idea was very nice: induce reflection on your personal feelings of security in relation to public fear.
The main and really well considered act of the evening was paraplay. Visitors could upload their most often played iTunes songs via the website or at the entrance, and would get a unique number in return. People could then vote for persons or songs by SMS and the DJ would only play those songs most voted for and with most overlaps in playlists. A huge screen behind the DJs visualized the preferences; blue circles represented male visitors, red circles female visitors. The bigger your circle, the better your songs matched the taste of other visitors. I think this act rather well rendered the idea of profiling user preferences. At the end of the evening the person with most shared songs won an entrance ticket to Paradiso valid till the end of the year. Obviously she was the ‘most average’ person present. I overheard people saying that they should have tweaked their most favorite list in their iPod so as to better reflect the current top 40; a nice example of self-discipline because of surveillance.
In the basement movies about surveillance, profiling and fixing identities were projected. I never actually noticed somebody watching those movies. I guess a pop temple is not the right place to go and see a movie. In the main hall however the little devil of the evening, Rob van Kranenburg, was dubbed Thought Jockey and a slide show about RFID and surveillance was shown. The pictures were quite brusque and accompanied by thought provoking texts. The box of Pandora was opened; the visitor was able to get a glimpse of the surveillers and surveilled. Nothing else but an uncomfortable feeling could be the result.
The absence of a red line through the performances, acts and events was rather disappointing: all acts seemed stand-alone. The nice and innocent hostess of the evening, trying to confront people with their personal data failed, because her information was limited to what people had decided to share: their playlists. In my opinion more possibilities could have been used. Since names and email addresses of those who had uploaded their playlists were available, the organizers could have shown quite something by searching e.g. social network sites. If they had confronted people with data not consciously provided, this would have caused quite a shock and had given the audience a more acute sense of possible adverse uses of data by coupling different digital identities.
The concept of the evening was most admirable. As a MSc of Artificial Intelligence and an experienced new media practitioner I encounter too many infobetes in my daily life. All day long we give away a lot information by using cellphones, discount cards, search engines, social network sites, etc etc. Too few people realize what may be done with the collection, combination and profiling of all these data. The Paraplay event was an ideal awareness raising platform. Unfortunately it seemed only the already aware were reached. Later in the evening, after the Paraplay event had finished, the regular late evening visitors – young students – arrived. They would have been the perfect audience for this awareness raising campaign: naive and innocent. Unfortunately even the “Loesje posters” in the bathrooms with thought provoking slogans were removed before the students arrived.
In short, the conceptual part of the evening was great, but the implementation was not perfect and the audience was not the desired one. This kind of events should be organized more often and Paraplay was a nice proof of concept.