Mata Ki Te Mata

Mata ki te mata (Eyes on Tāmaki) is an interactive experience currently exhibited at the Auckland Museum in the Living City room of Tāmaki Herenga Waka: Stories of Auckland. The project examines data surveillance through facial recognition and asks visitors to consider how they interact with their own smartphones and the personal information they spontaneously give away to private IT companies. The installation lets visitors explore what really happens when you use face filters and other apps on your smartphone. The data these apps harvest is only one of many types that is collected by corporations and governments in order to analyse our behaviour both off- and online. This is what we call ‘data surveillance’. Data can be used responsibly to do a lot of great things, such as improving how we provide commercial and government services to people, connecting us to friends and family, even helping us find concerts we might like to go to. But we are still figuring out how to articulate and protect our individual and collective data rights.

Year: 2020-22

Role: ideation, conceptual development, research

Collaborators: Danille Lottridge, Ethan Plaut, Amid Barde, Phantom.land, Museum of Auckland

Exhibitions: