Director, Glenn Lowry: When curator Paola Antonelli was assembling objects for this exhibition, she was struck by the fact that what some people welcome as security measures, others see as invasion of privacy. A group of Danish design students chose mockery as their weapon of protest against pervasive electronic surveillance.
Curator, Paola Antonelli These students in Denmark devised a humorous response to the problem of ubiquitous security cameras by providing a vending machine with How to Disappear kits. The How to Disappear kits are a selection of various items that can enable people to be not really transparent, but at least be able to be confusing to security cameras. They range from fake moustache to goggles that are made of reflective material and therefore blind security cameras, especially at night, to a series of other objects that can be folded in a quite beautiful kit.
This particular kit, and the vending machine that goes with it, highlight a very interesting issue that appears often in this show, which is the cultural differences and the different ideas of safety, privacy, and limits in different countries in the world. Security cameras that are ubiquitous in London were actually praised in the days following the attacks to the subway, to the Underground in London, in 2005, while elsewhere these cameras are fought and resisted against.