Amid recent NSA-surveillance uproar, music duo Big Data explores voyeurism in our tech-obsessed society with new song "Dangerous," roping in the listener with an interactive music video. The Facehawk experience, with permission, takes the viewer’s Facebook photos and statuses to complete the personalized music video (as seen in the above image).
"With each new song, we always try to examine modern problems of technology and the ongoing love/hate relationship we have with it," Big Data’s Alan Wilkis told Mashable.
"The song ’Dangerous’ in particular is inspired by this new and bizarre cycle of voyeurism we all experience with the Internet — the idea that we are able to peer deeply into the lives of others through Facebook and yet, at the same time, our every single click ... is anonymously monitored, tracked and recorded," Wilkis added. "And as innocuous as our day-to-day Internet usage feels, there’s something disturbing about what’s happening beneath the surface." "And as innocuous as our day-to-day Internet usage feels, there’s something disturbing about what’s happening beneath the surface."
Wilkis, a Harvard graduate who attended the university when Facebook launched, said he’s the social network’s 4,132nd user. He wants the interactive video to remind people of their lack of privacy they’ve subjected upon themselves.
"Facehawk is provocative, compelling and almost forces you to have an opinion about your personal information being so readily available online," Wilkis said.
Rajeev Basu created the Facehawk experience, which he describes as a "controversial and subversive" project. Facehawk takes Facebook’s HTML code and turns them into graphics for the video’s hawk animation.
"It takes something that, today, is such an everyday part of most people’s lives — Facebook –- and reframes it in a way that people have never seen before," Basu said. "It’s meant to be jarring and make people uncomfortable."
Wilkis and Big Data singer Daniel Armbruster’s EP comes out Sept. 24.
