Exhibition Of Images Taken From Hacked Cctv Opens In Whitechapel

Artist Nye Thompson and programmer Colm Ginty have collaborated on a show that questions the nature of surveillence in a networked world. Creating an algorithm capable of hunting through internet search engines for footage hacked from unsecured domestic surveillence cameras worldwide, the low-res images are to be displayed in a new exhibtion entitled Backdoored.io  

“The images tend to reflect contemporary anxieties, the things people feel they need to be keeping an eye on,” Thompson told WIRED Magazine. “People monitor their own beds, and those of their children or frail elderly parents; stuff you'd never normally see – a furnace in a pet crematorium, all the way through to the most mundane things: plugs in sockets, holes in the ground, recycling bins.”

Unsurprisingly, an exhibiton made up of unwitting subjects is ethcially probelematic – but Thompson insists that she is merely highlighting the dangers of technology in untrained hands – 

“These are devices generally brought by people to make themselves ‘safer’, but in fact they are making them vulnerable in a whole new way… Despite the super-proliferation of image noise around us, instantaneous global distribution channels mean that images can be more potent (and dangerous) than ever. “These found images, and the wider project, give me the opportunity to challenge the ways in which ‘enabling’ technologies are surreptitiously eroding our personal privacy.”

Backdoored.io opens in The CASS & Bank Space Gallery, Aldgate East, running from 05 August – 20 August. More info on the gallery page