If you had the power to control your data what would you do? Project Liberty, a new initiative founded by civic entrepreneur Frank McCourt with the potential to transform how the … read moreinternet works and who benefits from the digital economy, today unveiled 'A Project Liberty Experience', an interactive installation that explores that question. The initiative is led by Unfinished, the organization dedicated to strengthening civic life in the digital age, Global brand experience agency Jack Morton worked with Project Liberty to create 'A Project Liberty Experience', a provocative, interactive art exhibit prompting visitors to envision a world where they own and control their own data. The new immersive exhibit is now on display at the Shed at Hudson Yards in New York City and was free and open to the public from Thursday, September 23, to Saturday, September 25. Housed in The Shed's McCourt space, a 17,000-square-foot light-, sound- and temperature-controlled hall, the colossal 60-foot-tall cylindrical installation is designed to engage the public in an experience that highlights the beauty of our individual and collective data. It takes visitors on an interactive journey to tell the simple but powerful story behind how much data we create, its value, that it isn’t owned by the people and therefore we don’t recoup that value. The exterior surface of the cylinder features a captivating piece from acclaimed media artist and director Refik Anadol, a pioneer of the aesthetics of data and machine intelligence, along with an animation featuring responses to a crowdsourced survey asking the question “If you had the power to control your data, what would you do?” Projected onto the surface by 36 projectors, Anadol’s piece, titled "Machine Hallucination," is composed of more than 100 million publicly available images of New York City's architecture, cityscapes and landscapes that were processed in over a thousand latent dimensions. The work creates an entirely new audio-visual experience that explores how the use and monetization of personal data in the digital age is changing the way we tell stories in public spaces. Inside the cylinder, attendees will encounter a hands-on interactive data experience, designed by Jack Morton, that educates visitors about the journey their data takes and the alternative path that could exist. The experience, comprising two horizontal 45 feet by 8 feet interactive LED screens, gives visitors the ability to "touch and feel" the difference between the current, closed-off world of data ownership by private companies and the liberated world of data ownership by the people. As they near either of the screens they will have one of two different experiences, with the pixels representing their data interacting in different ways.
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