INSECURE ATTACHMENTS

(2016–2017)

interactive website + open access protocols
(view project documentation here)

Insecure Attachments was an experiment in developing feminist data protocols while testing the boundaries between data vulnerability and interpersonal vulnerability.

While the concept of vulnerability has been embraced as a catalyst for positive relational outcomes, the vulnerability of information is increasingly volatile, with multiplying opportunities for exploitation by corporate and government interests. This project highlighted the inherent tensions between making our selves and our data vulnerable.

The project’s initial run lasted one month, during which the collaborators assumed the roles of both researchers and research subjects, remotely inhabiting a publicly-accessible digital space modeled after a domestic setting. Their presence in the space included a real-time archive of the entirety of their text-based communications, daily live-streamed conversations during which they attempted and subsequently analyzed a series of progressively vulnerable exercises, and digital care packages. The experiment was made public through reuprposed commercial platforms, demonstrating the difficulty and tedium of accessing one’s "own" data.

At the completion of the month-long study, the project was re-envisioned as static documentation presented alongside findings, together with the protocols used to access and share data.

With: JP Merz.

Notes:
  • Winner of NewHive’s “Privacy, Surveillance and Prison Reform” Award
  • Developed and exhibited in residence at the Welcome to My Guest Room Digital Artist Residency