Data Identities

proto/meta (GE)

Know your digital fingerprint, 2015

Data Identities is dealing with new digital forms of personal identification as our identities shift more and more towards a hybrid state between physical and digital, and we start to digitise our unique physical activities and status with various logging mechanisms. The project presents the efforts of a fictional government agency to develop a new kind of passport that is not only showing physical body features, but also the continuously logged physical and digital behaviour of its owner.

The narrative is presented through an interactive installation that allows the visitor to explore mechanisms and technological potentials of lifelogging and data analysis and the test digital prototypes of the passport by manipulating identity datasets. Accompanying documents show the discussions of the fictional characters who create this new passport, providing deeper insight into the technology and raising further questions about data logging, privacy and the relationship of the individual to its invisible trail of data.

About proto/meta
We are Henrik Nieratschker and Marcel Helmer. We have been collaborating on design projects that critically question and examine the roles and potentials of technology in society over the past five years. We both studied at the Royal College of Art in London, which we graduated from with a Master of Arts in Design Interactions in 2014. Today we focus on the value of narratives to communicate emerging problems and implications of new technologies, developing work for exhibitions and festivals within our collaborative studio practice proto/meta.

@protoslashmeta
protoslashmeta.com

Data Identities was initially commissioned by Science Gallery at Trinity College Dublin.