The Digital Hub, in partnership with acclaimed artist and inventor Robin Price, recently commissioned one of its most unique art projects to date in the form of a laser installation called ‘Do Algorithms Dream of Electronic Shapes?’.
The live installation saw a nightly laser projection on the iconic St. Patrick’s Tower in the Liberties and explored Dublin 8’s relationship with social media and data.
The project, which is part of The Digital Hub’s involvement in health and wellbeing initiative Smart D8, explored the concept of privacy and how people share their lives to social media. At its core was the question how we see social media, and how it sees us.
‘Do algorithms dream of electronic shapes?’ took a random selection of Dublin’s social media, posted by day, and feeds them through artificial intelligence at night to ask what the computers see in us. Drawing out these digital dreams with laser beams, we saw what biases we have already trained into these algorithms, and how the ability to share and perform our lives through curated displays of imagery has changed us.
The project displayed up to 1500 interpretations of images each night, with the laser light show running on St. Patrick’s Tower at The Digital Hub campus from dusk until dawn. The resulting animations and photography are displayed online at the @do_algorithms_dream Instagram account.
The public artwork ran from Monday 17th of January until Sunday 6th of March 2022.
The privacy notice for this exhibition can be downloaded here.
Find Do Algorithms Dream on Instagram here