Niklas Roy plays with the concept of privacy in his recent interactive installation My Little Piece of Privacy . To defend his laboratory in Berlin from prying eyes he has in fact dressed its largest window, which directly looks out onto the street, with a curtain. The very small size of this curtain, however, has forced him to invent a system that uses a surveillance camera and a tracking system to map any passersby – and follow their movements with the curtain.
The effect of the moving curtain has amused the passersby who often stop to play, moving right and left, or pretending to go in one direction before suddenly changing. Instead of increasing privacy, Roy’s curtain has actually increased the interest and curiosity in his window. Putting aside the irony, you can say that we are dealing with an installation that perfectly achieves its purpose, which is to entertain people and make them reflect on the possibilities, even the playful ones, resulting from the interactions between humans and technology.

Vito Campanelli