Sensible Data

Martin Hertig won the ECAL’s Award of Excellence with a project that explore the issues of “confidence” surrounding data collection systems: fun in exchange for personal data.

Sensible Data is an interactive installation consisting of three machines that invite to create a passport from your personal data.

Take a picture of yourself and a machine will draw your portrait. Send an email and an algorithm will judge your mood, age, gender and beauty. By pressing a dubious button, you can get a nice confirmation stamp.

This project allowed Martin Hertig to explore the issues of “confidence” surrounding data collection systems: fun in exchange for personal data. After having completed the playful process, the user receives also an email from the installation, sending him all the data of a previous user (fingerprint, photo and email) without the previous users knowledge.

The three machines are modified versions of Piccolo CNC, an open-source drawing machine based on Arduino. A Raspberry Pi serves as the brain of the installation, running a python script for each step of the process. Each script listens to the desired input and sends the plotting commands to the needed machine.