Algo-Rhythmic Bodies: A much needed wake up call about digital privacy

It is very easy to be perplexed when you make your way into the 7th floor of Bengal Shilpalay. You do not know where to start. Every room is filled with screens delivering a message you get no context for, but you can feel the eeriness building up in every glance and every step, precisely the theme the exhibition was going for.

Running from 10 July to 24 July, the exhibition is titled 'Algo-Rhythmic Bodies'. Curated by Sharmillie Rahman, it is an installation-based exhibition bringing together eight artists and researchers working across photography, visual art, architecture, music, and more.

What makes it unique is that it does not tell its audience that technology is bad, or that the solution is simply to put the phone down. It asks something far harder: that people pay attention to the ways these systems are quietly shaping identity, belief, and self perception on a daily basis.

Every scroll, pause, reaction, and follow happens inside systems built not for the benefit of the user but for the extraction of their data. Behaviour is tracked, sorted, and sold.

We are willingly giving up our data to businesses while our personal data is being recorded and decoded to sell to advertisers and used for surveillance. So, the person browsing the feed is not really the customer; they are the product. 

The curation is intentionally made to confuse. The exhibition is split into so many sections that you can start anywhere and have a very different journey. You are given no context either, forced to interpret and feel every section on your own. The ideas are nothing that we do not know, but the execution is done very well with the undertone of a creeping fear.

You enter one room and it is filled with screens everywhere, each one analysing and tracking a different person. In another room, you are also being tracked by a live CCTV camera looking at everything you are doing. You are forced to confront our grim reality of a digital era, where our lives morph into nothing less than a binary combination of 0 and 1, where that data matters more than our right to privacy.

Naznin Ahmed's 'Already Agreed' tackles something most people have experienced but rarely question. When was the last time anyone actually read the terms and conditions before clicking accept? Ahmed's installation argues that consent online has become almost meaningless, so much so that it is placed at the end of the exhibition where now reading it or not has no real value.

Permissions are constantly being handed over without any real understanding of what is being surrendered. And the systems that collect this information do not just store it. They use it to predict behaviour, classify individuals, and make decisions about people, often without their knowledge. It is less like being watched and more like being quietly managed.

Dipti Datta's work brings this conversation closer to home. Since 2023, she has been visiting communities across Bangladesh, a village in Netrokona, a neighbourhood in Dhaka, and university students, studying the gap between how people present themselves on social media and how they actually live.

What emerges is something most people instinctively recognise: the version of a person that exists online and the person living their daily life are often two very different things. There is a small album present where you can place pictures of people's homes from a large pile onto profile pictures of real people who you think they belong to.

Perhaps the most eye opening work in the exhibition belongs to Walid Saddam. His piece 'You Are Like Me Too' exhibits a monitor displaying an uncanny feeling of human conversation with AI to show how our use of AI is becoming a bigger part of our lives. From solving our problems to being places of mental health advice, AI is steadily changing how humans are meant to live.

On top of that, data centres, which power everything from social media to streaming to AI, consume enormous amounts of drinking water. As digital consumption grows, a very real and very scarce resource quietly disappears. The connection between screen time and the world's water supply is not one most people ever think to make.

What the exhibition achieves across all eight works is a connection between the personal and the political. The daily habit of checking a phone is not separate from questions of power, environment, identity, and history. They are the same conversation, no matter how much we try to avoid that truth.

Algo-Rhythmic Bodies describe the human body as a kind of malware, something the system was not designed to accommodate, something that resists being fully sorted, classified, and controlled. And perhaps that is the most hopeful idea the exhibition offers. That a person is, despite everything, more than their data.