S+T+ARTS in the City | Artists-in-Residence
Mark Farid | Invisible Voice

+ About Invisible Voice

Invisible Voice is a digital arts and research project featuring a free browser extension, mobile app, and art installation that aims to reshape societal narratives and unite individuals around shared causes like environmental impacts, human rights, and corporate accountability.

Launching in early 2025, Invisible Voice’s desktop/mobile extension and app empower you with factual and unbiased information about the businesses behind the companies you use. Using data from 37 open-access datasets, it offers scores on political bias, lobbying, sustainability, and more, helping users align their activities with their values. The mobile app also scans products, logos, or barcodes to provide detailed information about materials, ingredients, packaging, and company data. Debuting at Ars Electronica 2024 as an advertising totem board, it identifies the brands you are wearing or holding and displays related subvertisements and news. When approached, the screen reveals data along with an interactive map revealing connections to other companies and individuals.

Prioritising privacy, Invisible Voice repurposes online advertising to create meaningful social impact instead of profit, turning data into action and fostering local communities around specific causes.

“This project it is linked to a broader concept of sustainable development, visualises the interests of different companies and proposes a handy app to decipher the complex web of relationships between companies. And it has a good previous development that ensures the achievement of the goals of the project.” – Tere Badia

The Invisible Voice project intersects virtual and physical worlds to lay bare the interconnected systems and flows which perpetuate the structures which have brought about the ecological crisis to make clear the connections between the decisions we make, the institutions we engage with, and the impacts they have. Invisible Voice will develop from a digital prototype into a fully realised and deployed tool (along with a total novel mobile phone app and interactive-art exhibition) which allows users to see key information about the who the people and business behind the companies are, the sustainability of them, and where the products they consume come from. When browsing the internet on a computer or mobile phone, when the Invisible Voice button is clicked, it reveals an overlay which displays a variety of information about the website and company you are on, from the political and financial connections individuals involved in the business, to their track record of food and agricultural sustainability, labour rights, employee ratings, animal testing and environmental sustainability. It also reveals the links between owners and CEOs to other companies and individuals, political lobbying, B-Corp certification, the media bias of news organisations, their Just Transition rating, Social and Suitability score, their Nature Benchmarks, Digital Inclusion, Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) risk, Ethical Sourcing, Environmental and Transport analysis, the carbon produce by visiting the website, if the website is safe, what is tracking them, and much more. Though Invisible Voice has a broad focus, environmental, economic, and human sustainability concerns are at its core. We use verified, open-access data which show their funding and methodology. To date, we are taking information from 21 different data sources which include: the World Benchmark Alliance, Open Secrets, Open Corporates, Wiki Data, Wikipedia, Media Bias / Fact Checker, Yahoo Finance, and many more. This has provided us with information on (at the time of writing) over 400,000 companies. This information allows the user to make decisions with a full understanding of their sustainability concerns, but also allows users to support those who are putting sustainability at the core of their business concerns, bending consumerism and behaviour into a more sustainable form. Far from just being responsive to the requirements of the individuals they engage, institutions will be able to make use of the information which Invisible Voice provides to manage their supply chains and engagements with media with a solid view to sustainability, passing this commitment onto the individuals and organisations that they engage with.

Website

+ Artist

Mark Farid is an Artist, Researcher, and Lecturer in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. He specializes in the intersection of the virtual and physical world, and the effect new technologies have on the individual and their sense of self. Farid’s work embodies hacker ethics, such as a focus on privacy policies, use of surveillance technologies, and campaigning for data privacy and protection. His work forms a critique of social, legal, and political models.

Graduated from Kingston University, London, with a First Class (Hons) degree in Fine Art (2014) and has since given talks and participated in group and solo exhibitions in England, France, Germany, Spain, Denmark, Finland, Slovenia, UAE, and Japan.

More Info

+ Video Statement

+ Credits

Artist: Mark Farid
Lead Developer: Orange
UX & UI: Tom Shearing

Invisible Voice is created by Mark Farid and developed by Orange. It is co-commissioned by HacTe and MediaFutures with support from the University of the Arts London, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, and GuestRoomMaribor.

This project has been developed in the context of the S+T+ARTS in the City project. S+T+ARTS in the City has received funding from the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology under grant agreement No. LC-01984766.

S+T+ARTS in the City is funded by the European Union under grant agreement LC-01984766 under the STARTS – Science, Technology and Arts initiative of DG CNECT. Views and opinions expressed are those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or DG CNECT. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.