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Artist Points To Data Privacy Scandals By Downloading Your Selfies

May 4, 2018 – An American artist Cassandra Zampini reveals just how easy it is to harvest data by downloading your selfies and creating a nearly 8-foot-tall artwork comprised of 1500 selfies: the number of selfies uploaded every two seconds.

Using an API program she easily found in web search, Zampini downloaded 20,000 selfies out of millions accessible and then painstakingly handpicked them for the piece.

“What begins as a personal expression to friends and followers quickly becomes data points in the continuous stream of information we ourselves create,” said Zampini. “We take photographs of ourselves for fun only to have it processed, characterized and analyzed by software and then stored in perpetuity. We now know that data can replayed in ways that can ever so slightly alter our trajectory and re-chart our course; our society; elections; relationships.”

“I’m essentially gathering data to be put on display and assessed the way a data company would, only this time it becomes a window into our society, an anthropological overview not possible before machines were able to compile such a wide range of human-created content.”

The piece called Data Mine, will be exhibited for the first time at Saatchi’s The Other Art Fair in New York this weekend.

Cassandra Zampini is an American contemporary artist who uses photography as her main media to explore political and cultural issues. Her work has been published in The Atlantic, and has been shown at numerous galleries and exhibitions including Carroll and Sons Art Gallery, 555 Gallery and exhibited at Boston’s City Hall by the Curator of Photographs at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

More info: Instagram | cassandrazampini.com