Aluminium Selfie Wall raises awareness about online data privacy

Selfie – a word which found its way into the dictionary in 2013 was first coined in Australia. In fact, in November 2013, the word "selfie" was announced as being the "word of the year" by the Oxford English Dictionary! It is a personal thing meant for the world to see. Selfie culture has taken over the contemporary world where it is meant to be seen as a form of self-expression. Even our Prime Minister had advocated ‘Selfie with daughter’ in 2015 which saw massive participation from the world over!

But have you ever heard of an aluminium made ‘Selfie Wall’ which lets you click stunning pictures of yourselves and your friends? AGENCY Architecture, based out of Texas, has created a ‘Selfie Wall’ right on the border between the US and Mexico. It is located in the region of El Paso / Ciudad Juárez, a border community. The Aluminum Selfie Wall has been installed in a public park which draws a large crowd for them to take selfies and post on social media – all for a good cause.

The AGENCY team has erected the wall with the objective to experiment and educate the people about the security aspects of their online data which they share through various platforms on the internet. This experiment is a part of creating awareness about data and privacy and knowing how much information is being shared by the people which would help them in providing solutions to protect personal information. Although selfies are innocuous photographs to you, a large set of data-crunchers use it to record your identity, moods at different points in time, your device settings etc. Enormous data sets get analyzed every moment and can thus be misused without one knowing about it. Therefore, it becomes imperative to raise awareness about data security and online privacy to the masses.

The ‘Selfie Wall’ is built form 162 custom-fabricated units, CNC-milled from a composite aluminium panel, and folded to shape different apertures for bouncing, scattering, and collecting light. The lighting is taken care of by a grid of LED lights which provide dynamic conditions for photography during different times of the day. The shape of the aluminium modules are major factors in providing rigidity to the wall surface and redirect light in a suitable fashion. The lighting configurations have been designed and customized to emulate a number of situations which would otherwise need professional photography paraphernalia to recreate – for example, the lighting conditions formed due to photo umbrellas.

The aluminium ‘Selfie Wall’ project was created to explore the limits of personal data privacy. According to the AGENCY team, “a picture may really be worth a thousand words.”

For more on the topic - http://agencyarchitecture.com/project/selfie-wall/

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