New Surveillance Exhibit Opens in Rio’s Museum of Tomorrow

By Charlotte Markham, Contributing Reporter

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Capte-me, Nenhum presença será ignorada (Shoot Me, No-one present will be ignored), which launched last Friday May 7th, utilizes an array of sensors to capture movements that then react to real-time data input provided by the museum’s visitors themselves. The new exhibition at the Museu do Amanhã (Museum of Tomorrow) in Rio de Janeiro hopes to make people conscious of the amount of data systems collect, by means of artistic apparatus.

Marcela Sabino, director of the Activity Laboratory in Museu do Amanhã and curator of the exhibition explained that the aim was to open the eyes of the public to the quantity of data and that their presence affects these systems. “Walking on the street there are cameras that capture us.”

“Our cellphone sends a signal called CDR so that every two minutes it knows its own location. More and more people are being monitored and captured in various systems. The interesting part of this is the power we have to understand this information and interfere with the system ourselves,” she adds.

During the visit, the public wanders through playful and exploratory environments and interacts with projections, sounds and graphics that change with the receipt of real-time data through sensors that capture the motion of the person, in accordance with the distance of the equipment and the temperature and brightness of the room.

It is also possible to access visualizations of the flow of people in the world through tablets and attend talks that explain the principal subjects around which the exhibition was constructed, such as the meanings of data or expert knowledge on the internet.

The director praises the exhibition for adapting a usually dense topic to become more accessible through artistic interpretation. “This is an artistic way of working the data subject, which can be very dry, in a playful way. It’s a metaphor for what happens in the world at all times,” said the director.

The Capte-me exhibition will run in the Museu do Amanhã from May 6th until July 20th 2016, opening from 10AM until 5PM. The Museum is located in Praça Mauá, in Centro, Rio de Janeiro and is open Tuesday to Sunday 10AM to 6PM.

The Museum of Tomorrow, designed by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, first opened in December 2015 as part of the renovation of the city’s port zone. The museum also offers a new exhibition on Santos Dumont, which will remain open until October 2016.