Digital Ghosts

This web application was developed for the 2020 open days of the HEAD. Any visitor could navigate to the website with their smartphone. Upon opening the page a creature would appear.

Main screen of the application, a creature observes the user and receives information from other devices.

Each connected device can call others and get responses, like frogs singing in a pond. When a creature sings, it executes a little dance and produces a sound that mixes different sources heard by their collective. The result is distorted voices and fragments of recorded conversations. Each of them can watch the user and tell the other what it saw - in short, spying on the user.

Screenshots of multiples instances of the application.

This concept of a Tagamogchi-like creature that spies on its user is a critique of technologies - such as the personal assistant - and of all the facades put in place by the technology industry to make a product less threatening, giving a false sense of security. This project explores the boundaries between users and their devices. Should we give AI personalities? How does data flow between humans, devices, and servers, and what is its ethical limit?