Large form artwork tracking of Internetix delegate's using their phones mac addresses over the wifi network. A first in Africa.

For Internetix, South Africa's most important tech conference, I wanted to playfully touch on the themes of tracking, surveillance and technophobia. We seem to naturally fear new technology - even more so when there's possible privacy implications. Just a few years ago exposing your GPS position was a very scary proposition.

Can we change people's emotions and make a technology that is perceived as scary more acceptable? Does tracking have other uses other than surveillance? How much data can we glean and infer when we do track people? What can the data tell us about people's movement in a space?

Beautiful and understated, and sometimes funny, large-scale installation with ambient pieces that played with data and revealed obscure connections between delegates.

Delegate speed and position over time. The larger the distance a person travels the larger and more-red is the circle. Over two million data points were collected, and built into a personalised invitation generator - for the following year's invitation - where each delegate received a beautiful poster of their movements from the previous year.

Technologies: Processing, Javascript, PHP, MySql, WiFi routers, triangulation software
Medium: Giant projection and large screen.