Digital installation and performance.

A series of unique, one-to-one performances with an AI puppet who investigates the data on your smartphone.

DoxBox trustbot was researched and produced during my residency at The Open Data Institute in London, 2018-2019. Commissioned by ODI Data as Culture and produced as part of an ODI R&D project exploring data trust and sharing, funded by Innovate UK. The portable digital puppet/tech drag unit interviews users about the apps, services and digital providers they interact with, reveals what these providers know about their users, then tells the user stories about what the effects of this may be and provides recommendations regarding their level of trustworthiness, relating to the individual themselves and to other people who may be more or less impacted by the same use or misuse of the data that accumulates around their digital life.

Performed at (among others) Camden Peoples’ Theatre, London, 2023, Furtherfield’s Future Fair in Finsbury Park, London, in August 2019 and at the ODI’s Annual Summit in November 2019. Talk and sharing at BOM’s Art & Tech Social in February 2020. In the ODI’s Copy That? Surplus Data in an Age of Repetitive Duplication group exhibition in London from 5 February 2020. From summer 2021 DoxBox returned to live in ODI’s new building at King’s Cross in London, finally leaving in late 2023 after a performance at London Data Week.

After a hiatus that occurred for obvious pandemic reasons, DoxBox trustbot appeared at Electric Dreams Festival of Online Storytelling every weekend through July and August 2020, at an ODI symposium in September, and then again at the ODI Annual Summit in November 2020.

DoxBox has also participated in a pilot study at King’s College London (KCL) on cybersecurity and the impact of interactive art works on peoples’ understanding of the data in their lives. This makes DoxBox, as far as I know, the only digital artwork to be scientifically proven to change people’s minds and make them feel better informed about the subject of the work, i.e. our unhealthy transactional relationships with tech companies.

Most recently (image below) it was on live again at the Open Data Institute for London Data Week 2023, this time in front of a live audience! A sometimes awkward, sometimes educational, and always funny experience.