Every action we take online – shopping, scrolling, searching  -- leaves a trail of data that is owned, controlled, and monetized by large organizations. Data control is the defining public policy issue of the future. Yet arguments about who owns and controls data remain behind closed doors amongst groups of academics and pundits.

Unfinished imagines a very different, more equitable and decentralized digital world. 

For their first ever public event - Unfinished Live – they convened experts across the social, political, cultural, and technical spectrum for 2-days in NYC to discuss the issue out in the open. 

If you can’t touch or feel something, how do you know it’s yours?​

We created an experience that brought two data futures to life in a single experience that people could see and touch. 

To demonstrate the colossal importance of this issue, we built a soaring 60-foot, can’t miss cylinder in the iconic McCourt Atrium, just off the High Line, and partnered with world-renowned multimedia artist Refik Anadol, to create a dramatic data visualization art projection -- titled, “Machine Hallucination” -- comprised of more than 100 million publicly available images of NYC architecture, cityscapes and landscapes processed in over 1,000 latent dimensions using machine intelligence.

To deepen the story, we intercut into the projection with the feelings of more than 1,000 real people from across the U.S. describing what they would do with their data if they owned and controlled it.

To drive the story home, attendees were invited inside the cylinder to engage with two 40x80-foot data screens that utilized LiDar technology and laser sensors for interactivity. One showed people walking by how their data is stolen from them and stored in “walled gardens” owned by large organizations; the other allowed them to play freely with their data through gestural technology – helping them to imagine a more equitable world where each one of us owns and controls our data.

Results

Nearly 5,000 people experienced the exhibit over two days — 60% over Unfinished’s goal of 3,000 people. It also drew more than 50 million media and social impressions as it was shared and talked about all over the world.