https://studiojuliajanssen.com/
Interview with Julia Janssen, guest speaker at the Humane Conversations event on the interplay of AI and Art, 1 July 2025
- Hi Julia! You have worked on many different projects. Could you share three that you feel best reflect who you are as an artist?
0.0146 seconds link
Dear data, how do you decide my future? Link
Mapping the Oblivion link
- In several of your art projects, you explore yourself and those close to you, often presenting personal data. What motivates you to turn such intimate material into public art, and how do you balance vulnerability and control in these works?
The topics I address in my work, such as data protection, bias in AI, algorithmic recommenders, and digital rights, are complex for most people to understand or relate to. And the systems I research are often opaque. That personal touch, using my own data to explain how a system works and how it affects me, or people in my family, allows me to reflect on delicate and complicated topics. For example, in Dear Data, explaining the entire data-collecting infrastructure designed by Meta is rather dry. But when people can browse through my data, find juicy details and get to know me and my behaviour, streams, conversations etc., then people get a different incentive to understand the deeper layers of the internet and this profiling system. That’s often curiosity. Not to understand how a system works, but to understand other humans and their lives. And the curiosity to browse through my data led in this work to understanding a very far-reaching and complicated infrastructure that otherwise no one would be very interested in. Art is such a beautiful way to make that tangible. So people can better relate to how it affects their lives, possibly, or society.
The same applies to Mapping the Oblivion, where people are curious to find the differences and similarities when portrayed by their Netflix recommendation algorithm. The most surprising element in that installation is that apparently, my grandmother likes Korean Horror Movies. That is a detail people will remember, because it provokes questions about how platforms like Netflix decide what you do and don’t get to see. Often, people feel trapped in an algorithm, knowing that there is something else to be found but not knowing how to search beyond the scope of the recommendation model. The other questions I provoke in this installation are about quantifying our choices. The way Netflix recommends titles, for example, Emily in Paris 86% match is highly frictionless and this methodology is now often used in other platforms as well. The more fundamental questions about living in a data-driven world are: “Will you only watch movies that are over 64% to your liking? Dine at restaurants that match your appetite above 76%. Date people whose compatibility is 89% or higher? Not pursue the career you want because it has a 12% chance at success? Do you want to outsmart your intuition with systems you do not understand and follow the map of probabilities and statistics?
- During the Humane Conversation, you mentioned your class action lawsuits against big-tech companies and your role as a data ambassador. From your legal experience, how do you think current (EU) laws could be improved to better protect personal data?
I’m not sure the problem lies within more or better legislation. In Europe, we actually have some pretty good laws for tech, GDPR, DSA, DMA and now the AI Act. The problem is more with the execution of these laws. In our class actions, we show that it’s illegal how Amazon, Adobe and X collect data from thousands of websites and apps. Cause they don’t have a legitimate consent or legal ground to collect that data. But they make so much money doing this, although knowing it’s illegal and they are risking a heavy fine. For sure, these regulations can and should improve, as technology is. AI is moving so fast, and training data is a huge data theft and for these kinds of problems is no good legislation yet.
But I think the problem is not a legal one, but societal. For example, the GDPR demands a lot from people to understand their rights and how to access their, and the implementation is lacking. So for proper data protection, you either should ’not use that app’ or get really informed and careful about what to accept, how to erase data or migrate data, etc. That’s just not operable. There should be a better framework for sharing and deleting data. And we shouldn’t individualise the problem. In Europe, the right to data protection and privacy is in Europe one of our basic fundamental human rights. Yet, it lies know in the individual responsibility of the internet user to be safe online. The industries and the governments have to take their responsibility to protect people by default and we should build an infrastructure that makes it not possible to misuse data and to prevent mass surveillance.
Because history shows that companies will find ways to annexe data and try everything to make more profit. Just legislation isn’t enough. These are way bigger issues. (Surveillance) Capitalism, data colonisation and the internet reflect problems in our offline world, like discrimination. So, in order to better protect personal data, we should redesign the deeper layers of the internet so they can respond to the current and coming laws. And we have to design a way that people have a say in who knows what about them and how systems work.