The COVID-19 pandemic has gifted video conferencing companies such as Zoom with a vast amount of biometric data to be rendered knowable, translatable and ready for economic exchange – such as faces, voices, and chat scripts. It is however as yet unclear what the explosion in video conferencing software means for the exploitation and monetisation of potentially valuable data for NLP, facial recognition, ML and AI training and other drivers within the digital economy which require urgent critical scrutiny.  COVID-19 has left us with little choice but to increase the volume of interactions we have in online spaces such as the video-call ‘room’, and with limited agency in how our personal data might be being stored and exploited. 

Zoom Obscura is a project that aims to give agency to the users of newly ubiquitous video conferencing technologies such as Zoom, while still allowing them to participate in online spaces and debates, enabling us to negotiate our own presence and our own value in these new spaces. In addressing this controversy we will share work we have commissioned from seven diverse media artists, creative technologists and designers to develop critical interventions that make the problematic workings of these technologies legible to wider audiences  while empowering users to experiment with, and control how their personal data (visual, audible, text input) manifest in online spaces. 

More information can be found in: The Zoom Obscura Project

Dr Chris Elsden is a post-doctoral 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. Pip Thornton is a Chancellor’s Fellow in GeoSciences at the University of Edinburgh, where she researches the politics of existence in digital spaces. Her doctoral 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 shortlisted for the Lumen Prize for art and technology and was also awarded an honourable mention in the Surveillance Studies Network biennial art competition (2020).