User Content? PRONI Exhibition

Open Mon–Fri 9:00–16:45, except Thu 10:00–16:45

The exhibition User Content? invites visitors to consider what happens to our data when we use online apps, services and devices. Unwittingly or knowingly, we may tick the box to agree to privacy policies because we want to use the apps or web services, often for free. Yet, we are not always aware of the data collected about us or how it is used.

Two aspects of data protection are explored:

1. Surveillance of fertility and pregnancy data
2. Data sharing through social media

The exhibits ask whether we are content with the power imbalance between us as individual data subjects and giant corporate data users. Do we wish to be content or critical?

User Content? is the result of the first collaboration between creative practitioners of the Belfast School of Art and legal scholars under the stewardship of the LawTech Collider project, an initiative of Legal Futures Research at Ulster University.

The research aim of the LawTech Collider Project is to develop a methodology using art and creative practice to explore public awareness of and our trust in law’s ability to control digital technological processes.

User Content? was first displayed in the autumn of 2024 at Belfast Exposed Gallery and this iteration, on display at PRONI, has been adapted to respond to evolving creative ideas.

User Content? is on show in the gallery of the Public Record Office of NI (PRONI) from 7 April to 30 May 2025.

The Creative Works

• Terms & Conditions by Daniel Philpott & Dr Kyle Boyd — digital on foamex
  Depicting common user journeys in agreements of social media apps, the six display boards are an experiment in delivering a simplified format of the critical content areas related to how our data are collected and used.
• Fairy Code by Dr Emma Campbell — digital photographic collage
• Digital Brace by Dr Emma Campbell — sculpture
  Viewed together, these works are a metaphor of being enclosed or restricted by a ‘one-size-fits-all' approach of generalised data used to advertise around, diagnose, and even dismiss sexual and reproductive health concerns. Biases that can result in data gathering can then be magnified, when utilised on a global scale, ignoring subtle but important differences.
• Privacy Policy by Dr Laura O’Connor — video installation
  Privacy Policy is a performance to camera video work where the artist reads the policy terms of a fertility tracker app and device to camera whilst engaging in a makeover of sorts, resulting in her disappearing into the wall.

Legal Scholars

Both formerly of the School of Law, Dr Katie Nolan (Technological University Dublin) and Dr Anna Pathé-Smith (The Open University) provided the catalysts to the creative works through discussion and interrogation. Focussing on their research on surveillance of fertility and pregnancy data harvested by apps and devices and the amassing of personal data by social media apps, they created the stimuli for collisions between the law and the creative practitioners.

Conference

The Devil in the Data: Civic Freedom and the Meaning and Safety of Data in the Public and Commercial Realms

To explore the LawTech Collider process and the dilemmas that surround data sharing in both the commercial and public contexts, a one-day conference will take place on Friday 16 May 2025 from 9.30am to 3.30pm at PRONI. More information and registration details can be found on the conference site.