"Within the Terms and Conditions" Favorite 

Practitioner: 

Date: 

Jul 15 2021

Location: 

London - United Kingdom

A popular theme throughout media is the relationship between technology and art. While art is often bolstered and disseminated through technology, discussions arise of how technology both positively and negatively affects content. Caroline Sinders’ exhibition Within the Terms and Conditions explores the way content has been spread online. Sinders uses a multimedia presentation commissioned by the Photographers’ Gallery to discuss unregulated content online and the authorities that decide what is allegedly harmful. The exhibition poses the questions: “What is allowed to be online?” and “Who decides what is allowed to be online?”

YouTube is one of the best known major platforms that represent the issue Sinders’ successfully represents in her presentations. The online regulations laid out by the company often confuse viewers and creators as certain content is deemed negative and other content is deemed acceptable. For her project, Sinders viewed hundreds of hours of toxic content to include in her multimedia exhibition. This intense labor is not unusual for Sinders, as her experience over the last eight years has been to research harassment and brutality online concerning human rights.

Sinders’ exhibition seamlessly represents the chaos brewing in these online platforms. The project features almost a hundred videos categorized into different areas of harm, ranging from anti-immigration sentiments to white supremacy. Each of the categories utilized were ones Sinders felt reflected the conversations taking place throughout 2020 and 2021, either as a response to the media or global phenomena. The presentation itself features fanatical news broadcasts overlapping each other in a fearful cacophony. The videos display various examples of harmful content posted online accompanied by a statement about the true intent of the content posted. Through Sinders’ research, she analyzed what each major online platform considered harmful content. Of the ninety-one videos found, only eight were removed due to the arbitrary community guidelines.

External sources: 

https://museemagazine.com/culture/2021/7/13/exhibition-review-caroline-sinders-w…
Posted by Momo1112 on Feb 23 2023

Staff rating: 

0

Effectiveness

How does this project help?

Amplifies (issue or campaign)Brings public and political attention to an issue or campaign.  Can include prefigurative action, making the invisible visible.

Timeframe For change

This project seems to be part of a campaign with a clear long-term goal. Long-term goals tend to be things like: end racism; end homophobia; make the sun stand still in the sky. A campaign with a long-term goal also needs to have some kind of theory of change.
Asking people to think about freedom of speech and their relationship with the Internet/social media

Notes

People who visit the gallery or browse it online might start to think about the online content, cyber violence, and their relationship with social media, But not a huge range of influence