Welcome to LYFE™

LYFE was produced in collaboration with Eliot Krimsky of Glass Ghost and Alex Reeves during a residency at PS122. You can view a full list of the collaborators here.

In an attempt to interrogate the relationship between corporate culture and surveillance, we created a fake company named 'LYFE.' The PS122 online ticket sales information was used to scrape data on all audience members with the aid of some algorithms and a few interns. User data was taken from various social media including Twitter, Facebook, and human-assisted Google Image and general web searches. We took specific interest in 'interests' and photographs, as well as text from status updates, tweets, and public information listed on the web about individuals. Things like "today I went to a dance recital" were inserted into our database along side the name of the individual and any other information we were able to gather about them through an online survey we sent to all ticket buyers. Attendees were given no warning that their information would be used.

Eliot, as the director of the project, created a narrative arc which began with the LYFE company introducing itself as a magnanimous corporate entity using technology to connect people. The participants (referred to as 'users') were gradually brought into the performance with images taken from social media. After becoming clear that the company had amassed far too much data--displaying images of relatives, text from the net, and assigning users a brand profile--the audience rejoiced when the system crashed. From there, the audience experienced the reversal of data collection as their images and data were deleted in real time as the actual program destroy itself. The experience ends with cellular division of organisms and an opportunity for the audience to draw onto the projections.

Below are some screen grabs of the show, but keep in mind that we were using three projectors running at 1280x1024 each, making a 3840x1024 canvas. I've downsized and zoomed in on the images for the sake of web-viewing.


  • A still from a video we made of babies being face-tracked with custom software written for the show

  • Some of the scraped user data

  • The program attempting to draw connections between user interests and brands

  • A GIF of the breakdown. Images are called from system memory and display in random chunks to create a 'glitch' effect using the audience data and photographs

  • All of the audience data (small section shown here), post-breakdown

Press

Hyperallergic Watching Your Digital Self Perform with Glass Ghost