(this conversation is) Off the Record

In her interactive lectures, Nirit Peled investigates crime-prevention algorithms, and their profound impact on people’s lives. The performances build on her decade-long study of the consequences of risk-based profiling by Dutch police. This research was also the basis for her documentary Mothers. In her latest project, she takes an even deeper dive into the systems that are supposed to predict which young individuals will become criminals.

Her main focus here is on an algorithm developed by the police and used as a risk assessment instrument. In front of a live audience, Peled presents individual people as both humans and datasets to show the workings of this algorithm in situations based on real-life events. People who are adversely affected by this kind of profiling have no one to turn to; no one is accountable.

The main characters are a journalist, a police officer, a human rights lawyer, and 125 youngsters. Peled combines radical imagination with thorough research to pose these questions: Can anyone’s life truly be captured in data? Who writes the script that dictates our lives?