humansbeingdigital – DesignSpark blogger exhibits @ The Lowry

‘Backdoored’ by Nye Thompson. Photo by Nick Hynan courtesy of BOM.

Nye Thompson has been sharing her engineering-inspired artwork with our DesignSpark community since 2013 – remember ‘Pencil, paintbrush, Arduino?’ or ‘The Art of Tech’? 

Nye’s latest installation at the forthcoming humansbeingdigital exhibition will build on her recent project, Backdoored, focusing on the vulnerabilities of the Internet of Things (IoT).

DesignSpark is really excited to be supporting Nye’s installation at her latest exhibition at The Lowry, Manchester. We’ve donated a number of Raspberry Pi Premium Display kits, which will be reused after the exhibition in setting up a digital skills lab for youngsters in Salford, Manchester.

The Lowry (Facade) Copyright: Percy Dean

We grabbed some time with Nye as she finalised her art installation to find out more…

Firstly Nye, could you tell us a bit about your background?

I did my first degree in Fine Art, back in the late 80s. Strange to think that there weren't actually any computers in the art department at the time, and I didn’t get my first PC until a few years later. Anyway, one day my brother who's a software developer suggested I check out this brand new thing called the World Wide Web. I bought a modem and was quickly hooked. I started doing web design work, and as the technology matured I moved into software and user experience design. I spent years totally immersed in the digital world. But then in 2011, I wanted a new challenge, and I went back to university to do a part-time Fine Art MA.

What you do now and how did you get the idea to combine art with technology?

Since then I've been combining the two careers – software design and art. It's quite a balancing act but I think my work in software really informs and facilitates my artwork. I feel like a lot of my artistic practice is about porting important ideas from the engineering domain and reframing them within an art context. There are so many vital debates taking place within the technology world, but many of them are hard to grasp for people without that domain knowledge. I'm trying to bring an artist perspective to some of these key debates but also make them accessible to a wider audience.

Tell us about the serious security implications of internet-connected devices that your art aims to portray...

Well, the Internet of Things is growing rapidly, and this is happening at a far faster rate than public or even government understanding of the issues and risks. When I encountered the image feeds used in Backdoored – which are images taken by security-testing search bots though insecure IP cameras – this was a really significant discovery for me. These images gave me the opportunity to explore these issues in a visual and potentially highly impactful way.

Images from ‘Backdoored’

I would say that there are two major, though intertwined, strands of security concerns associated with the IoT: firstly, the risk of potentially sensitive data about our private lives becoming available to external parties; and secondly the risk of our devices being surreptitiously controlled by other parties. My Backdoored installation in humansbeingdigital at the Lowry touches on both of these, and I hope will encourage the gallery visitor to think about and discuss these issues.

What’s next on the agenda for you Nye?

I am continuing to develop and tour Backdoored, but I’ve also recently begun work on a brand new project. Over the 18 months I’ve been working on Backdoored, I’ve become increasingly interested in the machinic genesis of the images I’m collecting. They are generated in the instant that a search-bot discovers an unprotected security camera.  There is no human agency involved, only an emergent system acting on algorithmic ‘instinct’. Our machines are looking back at us, and I started wondering what they could see and how they were learning to interpret that vision.

This new project is an exploration of the nascent machine gaze and is called The Seeker. Using a specially-developed software system, The Seeker travels the world virtually and describes for us what it sees. Named for Ptah-Seker, the artist/technologist god of the Ancient Egyptians, who created the world by speaking the words to describe it, this project looks at how the act of describing the world might establish a whole new worldview for machines and humans alike.

Find out more

Nye Thompson’s Backdoored installation at The Lowry is just one of the global artists taking part in the humansbeingdigital exhibition. Also on show is ‘A Hipster Bar’ which uses an algorithm to determine if you are ‘hip’ enough to enter!

humansbeingdigital is free to enter, but please note, the exhibition does contain some adult content. Visit The Lowry to find out more.