Graduate student cyberstalks Facebook followers for MFA solo exhibit

Design | Media Arts graduate student Mathew Dryhurst sits down at his computer to do some Facebook stalking – all in the name of his current art project.

With just a few clicks of his mouse, he uncovers details about followers that he will then present back to them at his upcoming show. Though most find themselves cyberstalking to learn more about someone they just met, Dryhurst does it to educate his audience on the importance of Internet privacy and the ease by which their personal information can be obtained.

As part of the Design | Media Arts master of fine arts solo exhibitions, Dryhurst’s “Mine” will open Tuesday in the Broad Art Center. Dryhurst created a Facebook event informing his followers of the coming show and used information about those who confirmed their attendance to frame his narrative.

His intention is not to alarm, but rather to inform his audience members of the amount of information they are making accessible on the Web in a meta display on personal privacy.

“I’m taking the information – perhaps the name of a street that someone grew up on or a business that may have been near the school that (he or she) went to – and then trying to create a (fictional) narrative from scratch based on all this information,” Dryhurst said.

For Tuesday’s show, Dryhurst turned the personal information he collected into a fictional play that he will present as an audio piece. The piece consists of a theatrical reading of his screenplay by voice actor Alexander Williams, as well as a backdrop of computer-generated noises Dryhurst encountered while gathering details of his audience. He said he employed a sound patch to collect the computer’s sounds as he compiled this information.

“There are a lot of peculiar, granulated sounds. … (I use this) patch while I’m researching people so the textures and the sounds are documentation of the process of spying on them,” Dryhurst said.

Dryhurst said he exposes this personal information in order to spur conversation about online privacy in today’s technologically driven society. Whereas companies used to market to an abstract public, data mining and social media have allowed advertisers to collect detailed information on increasingly personal levels.

“Now the audience is quite literally you,” Dryhurst said. “(Advertisers) can find out a lot about you.”

Hsin-yu Lin, a Design | Media Arts graduate student who displayed her work in last week’s solo exhibition, said Dryhurst’s focus is on articulating the ethics of a piece and getting the audience to think more about what it puts on social network platforms. She said she is inspired by his willingness to use art for this greater, functional purpose.

“The biggest point of principle is I’m trying to find ways to utilize that (personal) information and also think of ways that it might be of some benefit, even though it sounds really terrifying at first,” Dryhurst said.

Unlike the companies Dryhurst is mimicking, he rarely uses algorithms to obtain personal details. Instead, he said he manually seeks out information about his audience members through pointed exploration of their online profiles.

Daniel Schwarz, a Design | Media Arts graduate student, said this personalization makes Dryhurst’s work more accessible to the general public.

“(He utilizes) a very transparent way of working … a very do-it-yourself, low-tech approach which lets people directly identify what the process (of obtaining this information) is, instead of hiding it behind a custom software,” Schwarz said.

By presenting such specific personal details, Dryhurst said he hopes to get people thinking about the privacy violations that could be coming in the future.

“That’s kind of the more interesting thing for me. We know what they’re capable of now. How can we anticipate what they’re doing next just as they can anticipate what we’re doing next?” Dryhurst said.