Colliding ideas: Artistic explorations of data surveillance and data protection

This paper presents a case study of a pilot interdisciplinary collaboration between digital technology law scholars and academic creative practitioners leading to the public art exhibition User Content? in Belfast in the autumn of 2024. Called LawTech Collider to encapsulate the premise that communication across disciplinary boundaries is often unpredictable, this interdisciplinary collaboration was conceptualised as a collision of ideas aimed at generating unforeseeable outcomes for collaborators and audience, that could be harvested, analysed and utilised as jumping off points for further work. The LawTech Collider pilot shared research related to data protection issues, particularly in social media and fertility tracking, with academic creative practitioners as the first collision, leading to a series of artistic reactions and discussion. The second collision took place when the audience interacted with the exhibition, evidencing their experience in the form of written feedback. Evaluation of the pilot indicated interest in further collisions with ‘silo-bridging’ effects and specific methods to promote incursions into the other discipline, and to measure the changing nature of interdisciplinarity over time. The paper contributes a frame of reference to steer practice of the interdisciplinary aspects of the pilot including team-building, goal-setting, the craft and conduct, and evaluating interdisciplinary collaboration.