"I Spy" Musical Sketch

‘I Spy’

Last week Stuti and I came up with a concept for I Spy, a sonic installation based on activity on a public network. The aim is to turn the constant invisible and silent data that we produce into something tangible, and to show how much of that data can be monitored.

This week we came up with a list of events that can occur on a network. We split up and composed sounds for each of these events.

Some of the events we wanted to capture:

• Connects to network
• Disconnects from network
• Requests site (GET request)
• Posts data (POST request)
• Agent (what device is connecting) — different sounds for different types of phones/computers
• Web sockets are used
• Streaming video or sound
• Visits social / social media site
• Visits news site
• Visits video site
• sends text message
• Advertisement is loaded
• Posts un-encrypted sensitive data (password or credit card number)

Below is a video of us manually triggering the sounds. Each track is labelled with the type of event that would trigger it.