Terms of Service - Sophia Oppel

This piece employs vacant sites - places that data travels through - as an architecture to denote the physical roots and repercussions of supposedly “immaterial” digital surveillance infrastructures. Fragmented 3D scans of Xpace’s interior are translated into laser-cut acrylic barriers that curate the viewer’s movement. Upon entering Xpace, viewers are recorded and broadcast through the transparent architecture, rendering them unpaid labourers with little agency over their projection. The use of the viewer’s image as the installation’s content draws a parallel to the monetized data that we emit during online participation. In this way, a correspondence is created between the gallery and the corporatized internet as institutional spaces that preach emancipation yet perpetuate embedded hegemonic hierarchies.

This work was apart of VPN to IRL at Xpace Cultural Center, Curated by Tak Pham. This show was also apart of Images Festival.

Curatorial essay can be found here:

http://www.xpace.info/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Main-space_VPN_IRL.pdf