Where law meets tech meets art
The LawTech Collider project explores a participatory approach to public legal education, raising awareness of cutting-edge legal research and generating law-related research by virtue of the learning yielded by extensive experimental public interactions. By this approach it aims to generate greater impact of research, innovation in research methodologies and new forms of research outputs.
Law, legal frameworks and regulations touch our lives in a million visible and invisible ways. While most of us accept they exist and will engage when necessary, most of us know little about them. LawTech Collider communicates, celebrates and challenges how people think about law, by means of engaging exhibits co-produced by creative practitioners, designers and legal scholars through iterative processes.
Exhibitions
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User Content? Exhibition
User Content? took place from 25 October to 2 November 2024, at 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? explored and exposed the capacity of the law to control digital technology processes for the good of our society.
User Content? was 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? displayed work created specifically to respond to law and scholarship in two areas of data protection:
- Surveillance of fertility and pregnancy data
- Data sharing through social media.
These works invite 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 was 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 concluded with a panel discussion in which collaborating colleagues responded to 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.
LawTech Collider rests on the following principles:
Innovation — a playful, experimental, celebratory approach to public legal education, disseminating legal scholarship and generating novel research (in terms of theme and form) is innovative. LawTech Collider aims to turn facts into learning, feelings and action.
Participation — LawTech Collider involves visitors in curated exhibits, offering them information or perspectives that engage their attention and emotions in an entertaining and captivating way. Trained mediators with appropriate expertise assist the visitors to engage with the exhibit. Visitors may also become a consenting contributor of data to a research study related to the exhibit or another area of law.
Visitors’ reactions to the exhibit inspire or trigger further relevance to the exhibit for the researchers. As demonstrated by Michael John Gorman’s ‘Idea Colliders’ exhibited at Trinity College Dublin’s Science Gallery in Dublin (and now replicated elsewhere), artistic collaboration with scientific research created exhibits to engage the public and collide yet more ideas:
‘Ideas Colliders – places to connect emerging research with the public, drawing the insights and concerns of the public into research, and through this process, transforming the role and relevance of the university itself.’
(MJ Gorman, Idea Colliders, p152)
LawTech Collider will do this for law.
For all – LawTech Collider is essentially audience-centred with no limit at whom it is aimed. Some exhibits may be targeted at a specific sector of the community, while others will be for all.
Inspiration here is taken from Nina Simon’s OF/BY/FOR ALL approach to helping public institutions become more inclusive, equitable, and relevant to their communities.
Law – the overarching subject area is law which inevitably covers a vast array of possible themes, topics, angles, connections. Led by researchers’ interests, each exhibit will highlight an area of law of significance and relevance.
Impact – so much legal scholarship stays within the academy and the legal profession, yet so much of it has personal, societal and national significance. LawTech Collider will aerate legal scholarship through playful and participatory exhibits to reach a broader audience.
The Team
Prof Eugene McNamee
With interests in legal education, technology as an anthropological process, information flow processes in complex communicative systems and Law & Film, his vision for LawTech Collider combines these interests to evolve a culturally significant entity bridging the divide between creative and legal practice.
Dr Lucy Royal-Dawson
Research Associate on the LawTech Collider project. With a background in social justice and human rights research, rights-based and participatory methods and the curation of cinematic events, she manages the development of the project and steers its public legal education research objectives.