Visitors of the exhibition were asked to read out loud a bedtime story about a boy going to bed and telling his mom what he will be dreaming that night. The lines appeared one by one on the screen for the participant to read out loud. They were promised that only their voice would be recorded. Little did they know that the story was comprised of the shuffled lyrics of a famous song, and that for every line a short video was recorded. When the story was over, the music started playing and they would see themselves performing the lyrics of the song.

The work tries to emphasise the difficult nature of ownership of data, beyond the legal realm. To what extent am I allowed to remix and manipulate recordings of you? When will it still be you?

The participants saw only themselves performing the entire song. The video above shows a montage with all the participants present at the exhibition in Quartair, The Hague on June 5th 2015. The project was created for the New Media/New Technologies course taught by Peter van der Putten as part of the Media Technology programme at Leiden University. The software for recording and playback was created in Max MSP 7.