Behind The Scenes

The rise of Mixed Reality(MR) and the ‘Metaverse’ brought my attention to not
only the front end of the technologies, but also the backstage of its development
and operation, and the moral and ethical ground immediately surrounding by.

As users of MR, we voluntarily with consent, and involuntarily without notice, allow
the collection of data that personalize ourselves and ‘enhance user experiences’,
such as geolocation through GPS and the gaze of cameras, position of our body
and physical activity through motion detection, voices through microphones,
anatomy through sensors and analysed by algorithms. We are inviting filtered
information, so-called Augmented Reality(AR), to be overlaid on top of the reality
we live in, leading to an ‘immersive’ lifestyle. When taking MR further down the
virtual world, we enter the world of Virtual Reality(VR) by closing off from the
real and accepting what is being proposed. To what extent should we rely on the
vision of the ‘alternative realm’ that differs from the real, and is imposed onto us
rather than created by ourselves?

Alongside the ride of development in MR technology, ‘blockchain’ and ‘Web 3.0’
join the trend, and the MR platform becomes a perfect host of digital content
as Non-Fungible Tokens(NFTs) to parasitize. Multiple events have occurred with
the extensions of MR technologies’ applications, such as the spreading of scams
across several social media platforms targeting NFTs of notable creators and
collectors of digital artefacts. In other news, NFTs were also used in auctions for
trading physical homes, which allowed money laundering and tactically avoiding
taxes. In parallel, we were also inspired by Banksy’s self–destruction of “Love
Is in the Bin” artwork during Sotheby’s auction event. The way Banksy devised
this performance to subvert the excesses of the art trade was something that we
wanted to implement and portray in the story. When MR is being advertized as
the future way of living, how would financial properties be treated in the digital
domain?

“Behind The Scenes” is a project that speculates the odds of how untrustful MR technology can be and is potentially embedded in the near future of a ‘Hi-Tech’, ‘web 3.0’ and ‘crypto’ based society that people are ‘envisioning’. Plotting the story in a fictional setting, cybersecurity in MR is contextualized with a twist in combination with physical theft. The project also further humanises the downside of technology and dehumanises our physicality, which must be adapted to the digital world. In this project, I would like to raise awareness of the instability of the development framework and uncertainty in the use cases of MR, and provoke a conversation about the volatility of digital assets, such as NFT, and its dependence on physical time, space, and energy.