Intimate Data Collector

Do you feel your phone is haunting you? The device you whisper into and touch a thousand times a day remembers everything. Its listening in, knows where you are, subtly manipulates you into its own alien whims. You carry it like a talisman, and it carries you too: photos, secrets, habits, confessions. It becomes more like you, coated in sloughed-off skin, sprayed saliva and smudged fingerprints And it changes you back. Rewires your muscle memory, hunches your neck, lengthens shape of your eyes. We are already merging.

Intimate Data Collector is a speculative artifact, imagining a future where our relationship with our devices has turned into full co-dependence. The object evokes the paradox of contemporary intimacy: the desire for connection coupled with the invasive surveillance of our most vulnerable states.

The sculpture is constructed from paper pulp and plastic tubing that recalls medical apparatus and data cables alike. Human nails embedded within the structure serve as both reliquary and bio-data storage. This piece examines how contemporary intimacy has become a site of both profound connection and systematic exploitation, where the very technologies that promise to bring us closer also function as mechanisms of extraction and control.