Have you wondered about Zoom video conferencing and all that data being made available? Perhaps questioned ethical issues in addition to those associated with data security? Is so and you’d like to come up with a creative intervention that delves beyond encryption issues, there’s Zoom Obscura (on the creativeinformatics.org website),

CI [Creative Informatics] researchers Pip Thornton, Chris Elsden and Chris Speed were recently awarded funding from the Human Data Interaction Network (HDI +) Ethics & Data competition. Collaborating with researchers from Durham [Durham University] and KCL [Kings College London], the Zoom Obscura project aims to investigate creative interventions for a data ethics of video conferencing beyond encryption.

The COVID-19 pandemic has gifted video conferencing companies, such as Zoom, with a vast amount of economically valuable and sensitive data such as our facial and voice biometrics, backgrounds and chat scripts. Before the pandemic, this ‘new normal’ would be subject to scrutiny, scepticism and critique. Yet, the urgent need for remote working and socialising left us with little choice but to engage with these potentially exploitative platforms.

While much of the narrative around data security revolves around technological ‘solutions’ such as encryption, we think there are other – more creative – ways to push back against the systems of digital capitalism that continue to encroach on our everyday lives.

As part of this HDI-funded project, we seek artists, hackers and creative technologists who are interested in experimenting with creative methods to join us in a series of online workshops that will explore how to restore some control and agency in how we can be seen and heard in these newly ubiquitous online spaces. Through three half-day workshops held remotely, we will bring artists and technicians together to ideate, prototype, and exhibit various interventions into the rapidly normalising culture of video-calling in ways that do not compromise our privacy and limit the sharing of our data. We invite interventions that begin at any stage of the video-calling process – from analogue obfuscation, to software manipulation or camera trickery.

Selected artists/collectives will receive a £1000 commission to take part and contribute in three workshops, in order to design and produce one or more, individual or collaborative, creative interventions developed from the workshops. These will include both technical support from a creative technologist as well as a curator for dissemination both online and in Edinburgh and London.

If you are an artist / technologist interested in disrupting/subverting the pandemic-inspired digital status quo, please send expressions of interest of no more than 500 words to pip.thornton@ed.ac.uk , andrew.dwyer@bristol.ac.uk, celsden@ed.ac.uk and michael.duggan@kcl.ac.uk by 8^th October 2020. We don’t expect fully formed projects (these will come in the workshop sessions), but please indicate any broad ideas and thoughts you have, and highlight how your past and present practice might be a good fit for the project and its aims.

The Zoom Obscura project is in collaboration with Tinderbox Lab in Edinburgh and Hannah Redler-Hawes (independent curator and codirector of the Data as Culture art programme at the Open Data Institute in London). Outputs from the project will be hosted and exhibited via the Data as Culture archive site and at a Creative Informatics event at the University of Edinburgh.

Are folks outside the UK eligible?

I asked Dr. Pip Thornton about eligibility and she kindly noted this in her Sept. 25, 2020 tweet (reply copied from my Twitter feed),

Open to all, but workshop timings may be more amenable to UK working hours. Having said that, we won’t know what the critical mass is until we review all the applications, so please do apply if you’re interested!

Who are the members of the Zoom Obscura project team?

From the Zoom Obscura webpage (on the creativeinformatics.org website),

Dr. Pip Thornton is a post-doctoral research associate in Creative Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, having recently gained her PhD in Geopolitics and Cybersecurity from Royal Holloway, University of London. Her thesis, Language in the Age of Algorithmic Reproduction: A Critique of Linguistic Capitalism, included theoretical, political and artistic critiques of Google’s search and advertising platforms. She has presented in a variety of venues including the Science Museum, the Alan Turing Institute and transmediale. Her work has featured in WIRED UK and New Scientist, and a collection from her {poem}.py intervention has been displayed at Open Data Institute in London. Her Edinburgh Futures Institute (EFI) funded installation Newspeak 2019, shown at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe (2019), was recently awarded an honourable mention in the Surveillance Studies Network biennial art competition (2020) and is shortlisted for the 2020 Lumen Prize for art and technology in the AI category.

Dr. Andrew Dwyer is a research associate  in the University of Bristol’s Cyber Security Group. Andrew gained a DPhil in Cyber Security at the University of Oxford, where he studied and questioned the role of malware – commonly known as computational viruses and worms –  through its analysis, detection, and translation into international politics and its intersection with multiple ecologies. In his doctoral thesis – Malware Ecologies: A Politics of Cybersecurity – he argued for a re-evaluation of the role of computational actors in the production and negotiation of security, and what this means for human-centred notions of weapons and warfare. Previously, Andrew has been a visiting fellow at the German ‘Dynamics of Security’ collaborative research centre based between Philipps-Universität Marburg, Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen and the Herder Institute, Marburg and is a Research Affiliate at the Centre for Technology and Global Affairs at the University of Oxford. He will soon be starting a 3-year Addison Wheeler research fellowship in the Department of Geography at the Durham University

Dr Chris Elsden is a research associate in Design Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. Chris is primarily working on the AHRC Creative Informatics project., with specific interests in FinTech and livestreaming within the Creative Industries. He is an HCI researcher, with a background in sociology, and expertise in the human experience of a data-driven life. Using and developing innovative design research methods, his work undertakes diverse, qualitative and often speculative engagements with participants to investigate emerging relationships with technology – particularly data-driven tools and financialn technologies. Chris gained his PhD in Computer Science at Open Lab, Newcastle University in 2018, and in 2019 was a recipient of a SIGCHI Outstanding Dissertation Award.

Dr Mike Duggan is a Teaching Fellow in Digital Cultures in the Department of Digital Humanities at Kings College London. He was awarded a PhD in Cultural Geography from Royal Holloway University of London in 2017, which examined everyday digital mapping practices. This project was co-funded by the Ordnance Survey and the EPSRC. He is a member of the Living Maps network, where he is an editor for the ‘navigations’ section and previously curated the seminar series. Mike’s research is broadly interested in the digital and cultural geographies that emerge from the intersections between everyday life and digital technology.

Professor Chris Speed is Chair of Design Informatics at the University of Edinburgh where his research focuses upon the Network Society, Digital Art and Technology, and The Internet of Things. Chris has sustained a critical enquiry into how network technology can engage with the fields of art, design and social experience through a variety of international digital art exhibitions, funded research projects, books journals and conferences. At present Chris is working on funded projects that engage with the social opportunities of crypto-currencies, an internet of toilet roll holders, and a persistent argument that chickens are actually robots.  Chris is co-editor of the journal Ubiquity and co-directs the Design Informatics Research Centre that is home to a combination of researchers working across the fields of interaction design, temporal design, anthropology, software engineering and digital architecture, as well as the PhD, MA/MFA and MSc and Advanced MSc programmes.

David Chatting is a designer and technologist who works in software and hardware to explore the impact of emerging technologies in everyday lives. He is currently a PhD student in the Department of Design at Goldsmiths – University of London, a Visiting Researcher at Newcastle University’s Open Lab and has his own design practice. Previously he was a Senior Researcher at BTs Broadband Applications Research Centre. David has a Masters degree in Design Interactions from the Royal College of Art (2012) and a Bachelors degree in Computer Science from the University of Birmingham (2000). He has published papers and filed patents in the fields of HCI, psychology, tangible interfaces, computer vision and computer graphics.

Hannah Redler Hawes (Data as Culture) is an independent curator and codirector of the Data as Culture art programme at the Open Data Institute in London. Hannah specialises in emerging artistic practice within the fields of art and science and technology, with an interest in participatory process. She has previously developed projects for museums, galleries, corporate contexts, digital space and the public realm including the  Institute of Physics, Tate Modern, The Lowry, Natural History Museum, FACT Liverpool, the Digital Catapult and Science Gallery London, and has provided specialist consultancy services to the Wellcome Collection, Discover South Kensington and the Horniman Museum. Hannah enjoys projects that redraw boundaries between different disciplines. Current research is around addiction, open data, networked culture and new forms of programming beyond the gallery.

Tinderbox Collective : From grass-roots youth work to award-winning music productions, Tinderbox is building a vibrant and eclectic community of young musicians and artists in Scotland. We have a number of programmes that cross over with each other and come together wherever possible.  They are open to children and young people aged 10 – 25, from complete beginners to young professionals and all levels in between. Tinderbox Lab is our digital arts programme and shared studio maker-space in Edinburgh that brings together artists across disciplines with an interest in digital media and interactive technologies. It is a new programme that started development in 2019, leading to projects and events such as Room to Play, a 10-week course for emerging artists led by Yann Seznec; various guest artist talks & workshops; digital arts exhibitions at the V&A Dundee & Edinburgh Festival of Sound; digital/electronics workshops design/development for children & young people; and research included as part of Electronic Visualisation and the Arts (EVA) London 2019 conference.

Jack Nissan (Tinderbox) is the founder and director of the Tinderbox Collective. In 2012/13, Jack took part in a fellowship programmed called International Creative Entrepreneurs and spent several months working with community activists and social enterprises in China, primarily with families and communities on the outskirts of Beijing with an organisation called Hua Dan. Following this, he set up a number of international exchanges and cross-cultural productions that formed the basis for Tinderbox’s Journey of a Thousand Wings programme, a project bringing together artists and community projects from different countries. He is also a co-director and founding member of Hidden Door, a volunteer-run multi-arts festival, and has won a number of awards for his work across creative and social enterprise sectors. He has been invited to take part in several steering committees and advisory roles, including for Creative Scotland’s new cross-cutting theme on Creative Learning and Artworks Scotland’s peer-networks for artists working in participatory settings. Previously, Jack worked as a researcher in psychology and ageing for the multidisciplinary MRC Centre for Cognitive Ageing and Cognitive Epidemiology, specialising in areas of neuropsychology and memory.

Luci Holland (Tinderbox) is a Scottish (Edinburgh-based) composer, sound artist and radio presenter who composes and produces music and audiovisual art for film, games and concert. As a games music composer Luci wrote the original dynamic/responsive music for Blazing Griffin‘s 2018 release Murderous Pursuits, and has composed and arranged for numerous video game music collaborations, such as orchestrating and producing an arrangement of Jessica Curry‘s Disappearing with label Materia Collective’s bespoke cover album Pattern: An Homage to Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture. Currently she has also been composing custom game music tracks for Skyrim mod Lordbound and a variety of other film and game music projects. Luci also builds and designs interactive sonic art installations for festivals and venues (Refraction (Cryptic), CITADEL (Hidden Door)); and in 2019 Luci joined new classical music station Scala Radio to present The Console, a weekly one-hour show dedicated to celebrating great music in games. Luci also works as a musical director and composer with the youth music charity Tinderbox Project on their Orchestra & Digital Arts programmes; classical music organisation Absolute Classics; and occasionally coordinates musical experiments and productions with her music-for-media band Mantra Sound.

Good luck to all who submit an expression of interest and good luck to Dr. Thornton (I see from her bio that she’s been shortlisted for the 2020 Lumen Prize).