In July 2013, a National Security Agency (NSA) recruitment drive held in Wisconsin University was derailed by students, who took the two recruiters to task over lies told by the agency as revealed by the whistleblower Edward Snowden data leak. A few days later, an audio recording of this exchange was released by The Guardian newspaper.

Recruitment Gone Wrong reenacts this exchange by animating each of its four main characters through the automation of ventriloquists' half-masks. We think of Recruitment Gone Wrong as an automated mechanical reenactment and a kind of karaoke, constantly re-breathing life into a covert audio recording that touches on issues of our human rights to freedom of information and privacy in our contemporary world.

For us, this exchange between students and recruiters highlights a burgeoning culture, where we are encouraged to accept ubiquitous invasions of privacy for commercial and political gain as a 'new normal.' Recruitment Gone Wrong was commissioned by the Open Data Institute (ODI) as part of the Data as Culture programme