The Smart Home

The Smart Home is a project consisting of a series of photomontages that explore our increasingly technological domestic environment. The main focus of the project is to warn the viewer about how their personal data is recorded and subsequently used by large corporations that create potentially privacy-breaching products such as virtual assistants and home security cameras. As we are collectively more and more willing to invite these technologies into our home, I believe that we need to retain a crucial awareness about how our data is used. Inspired by works such as George Orwell’s 1984, the project delves into complex themes such as privacy, consumerism, security and surveillance.

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The main goal of the project is to evoke a response from the viewer - to make them question the technology they are inviting into their home and whether or not they truly believe their data is being used ethically by vast multi-million dollar companies such as Google and Amazon. I believe that some people are too quick to throw away their privacy in the name of technological advancement and that is why I was initially inspired to create the project as a visual response. If we are not careful about how our data is used, we could slowly lose more and more of our civil liberties.

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A key visual device I used whilst producing my body of work was to create and include a number of technologically mutated beings. Through their inclusion in my work, I am implying that some consumers often let the aforementioned products slowly replace their identity as they use expensive technology as a status symbol. Some individuals prioritise flaunting the products they purchase over actually needing them and I wanted to convey this metaphor literally through obscuring the faces of the models I used and essentially allowing the technology to completely replace their identity.