VOME in the arts!
Through the VOME project, Consult Hyperion has had the opportunity to participate in a number of public arts events over recent months. As part of the ESRC Festival of Social Science in March, we worked with our partners at Royal Holloway, University of London to organise an event entitled ‘Exploring Privacy: Your Privacy and the Internet’. Physical theatre group, Bimbilibausa, portrayed the potential pitfalls of the online world through the experiences of a clown. Throughout the performance the audience were able to direct the decisions of the main character by e-voting, as she moved from posting photos, to flirting with a colleague and dating online. This resulted in valuable data collection to underpin further research, as well as a video of the performance, which is accessible at http://www.vimeo.com/11164895.
More recently we have been working with Woking Writers’ Circle on the production of a collection of short stories and poems entitled ‘Privacy Perspectives’. As inspiration, we were honoured to have Dr Anne Rowe of the Centre for Iris Murdoch Studies at Kingston University, London, describe the complex privacy issues she faced around the publication of David Morgan’s book ‘With Love and Rage: A Friendship with Iris Murdoch’. Prepared for publication shortly after the Mosley case, great care had to be taken to ensure that the privacy of any identifiable individuals was fully respected. Having enjoyed this very concrete example of the legal issues surrounding privacy, we then went on to enjoy a performance of ‘Alice in Wonderland’ at the Yvonne Arnaud theatre – an excellent exploration of identity, distortions and unexpected consequences in a parallel world.
VOME (Visualisation and Other Methods of Expression) is an interdisciplinary privacy project funded by the Technology Strategy Board. Further details are available at: http://www.vome.org.uk
