Is

Is is a sound installation, for an active gallery space, concerned with exposing the identity hidden in our digital life.
As visitors enter the gallery they are asked to give their name. An algorithm searches the web for descriptive texts about the visitors and at random intervals selects a "telling sentence" to read aloud across the gallery space. Is uses techniques common in Information Retrieval to give a glimpse of what a digital identity might look like to a computer, specifically from a perspective of the machine.
For a brief moment, gallery visitors are stunned to hear their name associated with personal information whose origins cannot be immediately identified, yet are completely in the public domain.

by Yonatan Ben Simhon, Geetha Padapati & Alex Vessels
Presented at Shifting Sensorium, 319Scholes, New York, May 2011