Data Exploitation

  • Nick Lin

  • Data Exploitation

  • Nick is a traveling photographer born in Taipei, Taiwan and grew up in Vancouver, British Columbia. He has been exploring his own aesthetic and developing a strong personal style, which consist of conceptual works and editorials through means of experimentation in different methods including colour inversion and multi-perspectives. His interest in unconventional visuals combined with series of experimentation using the digital medium often portray an interesting perspective and a humor in his subject matter. The works are often inspired with a touch of cinematic sense in mind. He uses photography as an attempt to explore deeper emotional bond and as an intimate approach to achieve authenticity, personally and socially.

  • Today the anxious question – “are we being watched?” – is relevant to everyone regardless of his or her fame or criminal persuasion. Even without the permission to access our privacy, anyone of us can be watched at almost any given time, whether it is from a traffic camera in the streets, or the National Security Agency wiretapping our phone calls, or an advertiser following us digitally as we browse the internet. Technology has enabled a new era of surveillance that can gather vast amounts of information with little human effort, but what stands between and protect our own privacy is encryption. Data Exploitation explores the controversial debate about whether it is safe for the government or authority to request software backdoor from technology companies to fight against national threats, while risking the potential of exposing ourselves to unwanted party.
    Data Exploitation offers a visual crime narrative through a series of crime documentation and crime evidence curated by the perspective of a hacker, an internet vigilante, breaching into systems and attempting to hunt down the person who committed the murders. The main plot introduced four homicide cases that seem totally unrelated from the surface, sharing no relation in occupations, common friends, or personal contact. Although the cases were not linked by officials, they are deeply connected with more sinister intentions.