Your Private Photos Stolen & On Display

Two artists have created an exhibition of over 10,000 private photographs that they claim to have stolen from random people’s hard drives – perhaps even yours!

Eva and Franco Mattes explained that this massive wealth of private photographs came to them by pure chance. While using a file sharing program, they realised that fellow users had wrongly configured their profiles, giving everyone access to the entire contents of their hard drives. Recognising the opportunity, the artists copied the contents of circa 100 hard drives, downloading other people’s private pictures, videos, and music. ‘We were not hackers,’ explained Franco; ‘By chance we figured it out.’

The loot has now been composed into a slide show, with the private lives of random individuals now being splashed across the darkened gallery space. But the artists do not see this project as being really any different from social networking sites such as such as Facebook, where many people often unwittingly display the contents of their private lives to the world. ‘The Internet runs on voyeurism and exhibitionism,’ claims Franco; ‘All of us are members of this spectacle’.

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