Selected work 01 / 09
Gendered Digital Panopticon
What is it?
Social networks, apps and websites collect as much data about us as they can. AI algorithms use it to guess who we are, including our gender and sexual orientation, at a time when those categories are becoming more fluid. Gendered Digital Panopticon is a code-based participatory installation that makes part of that mechanism visible and asks where we stand inside it.
What did visitors see?
Visitors entered a clean, empty room with a table and four booklets in different colors. Each booklet stood for a group of gender identities, built from a survey I ran during the year in which people picked images they identified with and then stated their identity. Pink and blue follow the colors children are assigned, beige is a neutral skin tone for fluid and non-binary identities, and green comes from the flag of the trans community in Israel. Hidden cameras in the wall filmed each booklet for the length of the exhibition and sent the footage to computers in the next room.
How did I make it?
A glossary animation styled as a DOS-era command line explains the terms the project uses and hints at the code behind the scenes. I also built a walkthrough of the space in Unreal Engine, with an avatar animated from facial and sensor capture that explains the philosophy behind the project, narrated by Uri Koel.
How did I research the control room?
For the control room I studied 24 control rooms from film, animation, real life and critical design. Each image was split into dark, mid and light tones, and the averaged colors became part of the project identity.
