There was an art exhibit in London back in 2017 that I still kind of regret missing.

The exhibit was called the Glass Room,

and each piece challenged viewers to consider their relationship with technology and the systems and organizations behind a lot of the technologies that we use every day,

which is a sort of bland way of describing the often beautiful, very poignant pieces that were on display at this show.

There was a piece called Ashley Madison Angels at work in London, in which 3D renderings of

women called out from iPads that were installed around the space.

Their words taken from actual conversational text revealed as part of the hack of the adultery-focused

Ashley Madison dating site. And we later learned that most of the women on the site were actually

fake sock puppet accounts, not even real women. They kept up flirty conversations to keep men

coming back to the site and paying their monthly fees. And those were the conversations that were performed through these iPads.

There was another called Megapixels, which had viewers walk up to a camera,

which would scan their face and use it to search a facial recognition database,

printing out a receipt, the kind that you might get at a grocery store, listing your search results,

a match percentage from the database. Pieces from other iterations of this show, which have been

put on display in various cities around the world since the early 2000s. Versions of it have

been displayed in 21 countries at nearly 100 events,

and there are several on display right now, as I record this around the world as well.

Included amongst those other iterations is a piece called Amazon Futures,

which is a glass sculpture of an Amazon warehouse filled with bees, the drones working the shelves.

There's another called data production labor that allows visitors to hold their phone under a camera

and browse Facebook for a few minutes, and the machine then spits out a tally of the labor that you have just put in for Facebook, viewing ads and producing

engagement metrics that they can sell, along with a tally of what you could have earned

...