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‘You all have an aura. No really, every single one of you.’
Katja Forbes, Founder and Principal Consultant at Perceptive Ideas isn’t talking about a coloured light gleaming from your shoulders and reflecting your soul, but a digital aura. ‘If you have a smart device, you have an aura. You can’t see it but it follows you absolutely everywhere that you go.’
A digital aura is made up of the stories and photographs that you post on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and Instagram, every email you send, search you type into Google, and each pace you take around the block with your smart phone.
But how can this information make our lives better? Devices were once something we had to take care of: we would charge them, protect them with covers, and make sure we didn’t drop them in the toilet. But now, it has been observed, they can look after us.
In a world of Ambient Intelligence (AmI), devices can help companies harvest information from our digital auras to create experiences that make our lives better. Could this include how we experience and interact with art?
Forbes said having our digital auras hacked can be done with the best intentions. ‘At the most fundamental and basic level, the companies can provide things that they know you are interested in.’
This can be transposed to the art experience, said Forbes. ‘There is this feedback loop that they can get into to provide art opportunities we are interested in.’
‘It is anticipatory, and it responds to your presence and it is sensitive to what it is that you need. So if we can put art installations or cultural installations within exhibitions that can pick up on the digital aura and adapt the experience to you, that’s pretty cool.
The OpenMi Tours mobile app is one such example. Designed for people who are visual or hearing impaired, the app has a Bluetooth sensor that picks up when someone walks past an artwork and then it goes into an audio or Auslan description.
‘That’s a really brilliant example of using sensors and things around you to provide meaningful information to somebody who has got an impairment.
‘This is slightly off the concept of the digital aura, but it is using those sorts of ideas of, “this is who I am, my device is a part of who I am, I do have an impairment and my device provides me access to things”,’ said Forbes.
While a device can provide access, in some instances it can also inhibit an art experience. Forbes recalls her time at a gallery which had a comprehensive guide on a device, ‘I actually found the device getting in the way of me actually forming an opinion and interacting with the art itself.
‘I was watching a lot of people just looking at their devices rather than looking at the installations.’
It is a fine line between giving audiences enough comprehensive information and over-informing to the point where they simply interact with the tiny screen in front of them, diminishing the need to go to the gallery in a first place.
This is where creating unobtrusive devices or “wearables” can provide exciting opportunities for art. Companies like Nike are experimenting with technology and sensors that gather information to create a feedback loop based on your behaviour.
Forbes points out that there are now wearables that sit in your shoes and vibrate to give you directions. ‘If you had those [sensors] and the device was finding things out about your digital aura, it could guide you around the gallery without being obtrusive,’ said Forbes.
A feedback loop of your interests, tastes, favourite artists, and previous time spent in galleries could be aggregated to provide the best tour of a gallery or work, without a screen acting as a blockade.
‘This is about creating environments that are sensitive to people’s needs, that are personalised to your requirements, that are anticipatory of your behaviour, that actually respond to your presence, and create an immersive experience for you based on everything it knows.’
But could a perpetual feedback loop limit our world view? As Belgian festival director and curator Frie Leysen said, ‘Art should not please. On the contrary. Art has to show where it hurts in our societies, in our world.’
Art should provoke, challenge, and broaden our perspectives, but if through AmI we are only guided to the works that adhere to our existing tastes, could the very purpose of art be compromised?
Forbes said AmI could do the very opposite by providing the opportunity for someone to indicate that they want to be challenged and ask, ‘Today I want to be artistically challenged… Show me something I’ve never looked at before’.
‘In knowing someone’s preferences, you also know what the gaps are in their day to day experiences and you can look for opportunities to fill that gap and disrupt what happens in their life… art should be able to do that.
While AmI shows the potential to improve the basic functionality of our lives, enhance art experiences and challenge our view of the world, is there a dark side to having our personal information collected and mined? Should companies and governments have the right to use this data, or is it just once step closer to an Orwellian dystopia?
‘It is such a hot topic at the moment; the collecting of metadata,’ said Forbes. ‘Serious government decisions are based on metadata and they can say that it is used to build better services, and that is all really nice and good, but they also use it to make pretty serious life and death decisions.
Forbes is referring to the former director of the CIA General Michael Hayden who famously said: ‘We kill people based on metadata’.
A frightening concept, especially considering how many of us are completely willing to sacrifice privacy for basic functionality, ‘I don’t think people understand what they agree to. I don’t think they actively and consciously give permission, they just tick a box.’
But Forbes said we do have the ability to control our digital aura. ‘The “colour” of your digital aura definitely depends on the amount of participation that you take in this whole world that gathers this data.
‘People who participate less, people who don’t have Facebook accounts, they would have a lesser digital aura. The more you participate the bigger your digital aura,’ said Forbes. ‘So it depends on how much of your personal information you have sacrificed for functionality’.
Navigating the good, the bad and the ugly of digital auras and the use of personal data is about mindfulness, said Forbes.
‘What I am really trying to promote when I talk about it is mindfulness about what you allow about yourself to be out there… If you can get people to understand they do have this digital aura that follows them around everywhere, then you can start to promote mindfulness of what they put into that digital aura.
And remember, ‘There is no such thing as a free product or service on the internet, there just isn’t.’
