Client
Fundación Telefónica
Year
2025
Type of sector
Technology
Type of work
Exhibitions
Throughout history, rights have served to balance power relations, protect us, and give us a voice as subjects. The right to privacy, identity, freedom of expression, access to information... These things were negotiated over centuries, through struggle and friction and slow consensus. As our lives increasingly take place online, many of these same rights are still under construction. We publish, accept cookies, scroll. We do it without thinking, and while we do, we are quietly building the digital world we live in.
Fundación Telefónica asked us to bring digital rights closer to people, to show that they exist, that they shape our lives, and that they are still being defined. Starting from Spain's Digital Rights Charter, written by the Digital Rights Observatory, an initiative of the Spanish Government promoted through Red.es, we built Hoy es un buen día para hablar de derechos digitales: an exhibition that traces the freedoms, dilemmas, and tensions of our life online, from privacy and identity to algorithmic decision-making, digital labour, the right to be forgotten, and universal internet access. We selected twenty-one artworks, three per room, each chosen to contextualise, question, or make tangible the specific right at stake.
Memes and dilemmas as entry points
The challenge was how to bring something as dense as a legal charter into a space where people could actually feel it. We found two ways of adressing it.
The first was language. Digital rights tend to live buried under institutional jargon, so the challenge was to talk about this legal context within an internet context. We built an art direction rooted in digital humour and internet culture: room headlines that read more like posts than wall texts, looping video-labels that use real data and memes to ground each right in something recognisable, and a graphic tone that owes more to a feed than to a courtroom. The formal legal name and a longer explanatory text sit below, and three artworks complete each room. None of these layers work in isolation, they feed into the same conversation, each one approaching the right from a different angle.
The second was participation. In each room, we posed visitors a dilemma — not an abstract ethical puzzle, but a situation they could actually face. One example:
Your neighbour regularly posts toxic comments on social media. Finally, someone reports him and his account gets suspended. He complains about 'censorship’, but you breathe a sigh of relief. Would you prefer the internet to be a place where everyone can say whatever they want — even if it's horrible — or one where anyone can say whatever they want, or a place where hate speech is not tolerated?
The visitor scans a QR code, picks a side, and that vote feeds into a collective poem at the threshold of the exhibition that works as a manifesto about the digital future people want to live in and reflects on it based on their answers inspired by Audrey Thang’s “Job Description”. The poem changes in real time. By the end of the day it reads differently than it did in the morning - it reflects the digital future this particular group of citizens wants to live in.
From the personal to the shared
The exhibition moves as a physical progression, from the rights we hold as individuals to the responsibilities we share. It opens with a room that serves as introduction and context about digital rights, then passes through seven thematic rooms, each one dedicated to a specific right, and arrives at a final space about collective duties. We selected twenty-one artworks, three per room, each chosen because it could help us contextualise, explain, or question the right in that room.
00. Present Shock III
The first artwork visitors encounter is Present Shock III, a large-scale installation that floods the space with the real-time flow of global data, statistical clocks, global events, and everyday trivialities, all set to a sound piece composed by Robert del Naja of Massive Attack. It's overwhelming by design. The speed and volume of information disrupt our sense of time and reality, everything is happening, all the time, everywhere, and we receive it live on our devices. A way to anchor people in the noise of the digital present before asking them to slow down and look at its structure.
01. Freedom of Expression
We wanted to sit inside the paradox: the same tools that democratise speech can also amplify hate. This first room doesn't take sides, it holds both truths at once and asks visitors to find their own line between voice and harm.
02. Privacy
We treat passwords as shields and privacy settings as walls, but the gap between what we believe is hidden and what is already exposed is enormous. This room stages that gap, sometimes with humour, sometimes with the uncomfortable feeling of seeing yourself in it.
03. Identity
Offline, the right to identity protects what is yours, no one can impersonate or overwrite who you are. Online, it does something unexpected: it lets you multiply, blend personas, break the fixed categories that define you in the physical world. But at what point do the profiles we curate start curating us? We approached identity as something no longer just performed but increasingly computed, shaped by algorithms that classify, reduce, and sometimes decide who we are.
04. The Right to Explanation
We know remarkably little about the systems that shape our daily decisions, who gets a loan, who sees which job listing, whose face gets flagged. We wanted to make the opacity of these systems feel tangible: understanding how they work is what allows us to act differently.
05. The Right to be Forgotten
What lingers, and what should be allowed to disappear? We approached this room through the uncomfortable overlap between memory, privacy, and digital inheritance. The internet remembers everything, but that doesn't mean it should.
06. Fair Working Conditions
The digital economy runs on labour we don't see, content moderators, gig workers, and all of us donating hours of attention without quite realising it. This room pulls that invisible work into view and asks what it actually costs.
07. The Right to Internet
The last thematic room questions our access to the internet, the divide between those who are connected and those who are not, and asks whether there are more accessible, more sustainable, and altogether different ways of building it.
Where rights become habits
The journey ends in the Duties Room, where the format changes. The previous seven rooms made visitors reflect through art and the dilemmas they had been voting on, each room built as a dialogue between pieces. This one, even if it contains many individual elements, ultimately functions as one unified artwork. The idea is simple: our rights begin when we take responsibility for them to be respected, and that responsibility lives in our daily actions. So we wanted the space to feel domestic: a living room where different screens coexist as they would in any home. Smartphones, digital frames, televisions. The tone stays the same (humor, irony, the language of internet culture) but now it speaks through the objects and formats we actually use every day.
We created content for each screen using that language, with a mock livestream chat (called "Ahora Deberes", "Now Rights") where scrolling comments offer tips for healthier online debate. To allude to privacy, we repurposed captchas to help visitors spot the mechanisms that put their data at risk. Digital identity is addressed through social media stories with filters and stickers, and fair working conditions are evoked through mobile notifications with practical advice. The point is that rights become habits, built one small action at a time.
Manifesto
As a final reflection, the journey concludes back at the threshold where visitors find the collective poem, now updated and reshaped by the accumulation of answers provided through the QR codes in each room. Each line represents a digital right, rewritten in real time by the ethical choices of every visitor. This evolving piece of data-driven poetry transforms individual decisions into a shared narrative, a manifesto about the digital future people want to live in.
Digital Rights
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