'Privacy is at stake': what would you do if you controlled your own data?

The trick of Refik Anadol's Machine Hallucinations, a three-day public art installation at The Shed in New York City, is to transform the processing of data into surreal hypnosis. The immersive audiovisual exhibit towers over a cavernous 17,000 sq ft gallery in Hudson Yards, an outer ring of screens features a shimmering and chameleonic display of what looks like pixelated sand. But each square is a narrative of data: a familiar image – tree, building, lamppost, over 130m publicly available images of New York City searched and collected by Anadol and his team's algorithms – morphed into a single-colored square and then silenced by a single question: what would you do if you owned your data? The free exhibit, part of a $250m project to shift data ownership from private mega-corporations to individual users called Project Liberty, makes a tactile, sensory, emotional argument for data dignity and decentralization of internet power – concepts often so bogged down in technicality, abstraction and vagueness as to be inaccessible. The overarching aim of Project Liberty is to imagine an internet future not governed by tech CEOs, the forfeit of your data for participation, surveillance capitalism and the whims of social media companies aiming for infinite scale.