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

In an ambitious new installation, artist Refik Anadol used a 17,000 square-foot gallery to mount an immersive exhibit asking questions about online privacy

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?

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