User Content? Exhibition
25 October to 2 November 2024, Belfast Exposed Gallery
We are not always aware of what happens to our data when we engage with online apps or services, and we are generally even less aware of the legal framework that exists to protect our data. The exhibition User Content? explores and exposes the capacity of the law to control digital technology processes for the good of our society.
User Content? is LawTech Collider's first collision of law, tech and art in the form of an exhibition as part of ESRC’s 2024 Festival of Social Science.
Under the Festival’s theme of Our Digital Lives, User Content? displays work that has been created specifically to respond to law and scholarship in two areas of data protection:
1. Surveillance of fertility and pregnancy data
2. Data sharing through social media.
The work invites us to consider what happens to our data when we use online apps, services and devices. Are we content with the power imbalance between us as individual data subjects and giant corporate data users? Do we wish to be content, or subjects?
This interdisciplinary collaboration is the work of Ulster University colleagues:
- Belfast School of Art’s Dr Emma Campbell, Dr Laura O’Connor, Daniel Philpott and Dr Kyle Boyd
- School of Law’s Dr Katie Nolan and Dr Anna Pathé-Smith, now Open University.
The exhibition opens on Thursday 24 October by invitation only and then is open to the public from Friday 25 October to Saturday 2 November 2024 at Belfast Exposed Gallery, 23 Donegall Street, Belfast. BT1 2FF. 11-5, Tues-Sat. Free entry.
User Content? Panel Discussion:
Artistic explorations of data protection & surveillance
Friday 1 November 1-2.30pm at Belfast Exposed Gallery.
Two very different professional spheres - legal tech scholarship and creative practice - combined in this interdisciplinary collaboration to examine the surveillance of personal fertility and pregnancy data and, more broadly, how our data are shared when we sign up to use social media. The works have been created in direct response to aspects of legal scholarship in these areas.
In this discussion, a panel of collaborating colleagues will respond to Prof Eugene McNamee’s prompts covering the challenges of the law to control the way our data are shared, the opportunities created when responding to specific legal scholarship and the creative process of interpreting legal tech ideas and concepts.
The panel consists of legal tech specialists and artists:
Belfast School of Art’s Dr Emma Campbell, Dr Laura O’Connor, Daniel Philpott and Dr Kyle Boyd.
School of Law’s Dr Katie Nolan and Dr Anna Pathé-Smith, now Open University.
Attendees are encouraged to view the exhibition before the discussion at Belfast Exposed. There will be an opportunity to put your own questions. This event will be of interest to those who operate in art or tech or law as well as to social scientists with an interest in experimental methodologies for generating new approaches of knowledge creation.