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In 2019, the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity (CLTC) selected six art projects that explored malware, surveillance, tracking, digital hygiene, and cyberattacks through sculpture, zines, comedy, music, browser software, and participatory installation. Rather than repeat the familiar image of a hooded hacker surrounded by green code, the winning proposals asked what cybersecurity feels like in ordinary life: intimate, social, confusing, humorous, physical, and sometimes caring.
The projects were chosen through an interdisciplinary review that considered artistic merit, relevance, feasibility, potential impact, and audience reach. Awards ranged from $5,000 to $25,000. The original announcement described proposed works and planned productions—not a retail collection, completed product line, or guarantee that every concept became publicly available in its proposed form.
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Why cybersecurity became an art subject
Cybersecurity is often represented through a narrow visual vocabulary: a hood, a keyboard, scrolling code, warning symbols, and anonymous attackers. CLTC’s inaugural Cybersecurity Arts Contest challenged that vocabulary because security affects far more than specialist technicians. It shapes how people communicate, shop, work, receive care, understand consent, and decide what personal information is worth.
Art offers a different way to make those systems perceptible. A sculpture can give malware a body. A zine can turn security advice into a community activity. A comedy series can expose the assumptions behind “digital hygiene.” Music and choreography can convey the tension between connection and protection. A browser extension can make invisible tracking playful and visible. An installation can make the privacy implications of connected elder care impossible to ignore.
The six winners therefore belong together less because they share a medium than because they translate technical systems into human experiences.
Read CLTC’s original announcement of the six winners.
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| Project | Artists | Form | Central question |
|---|---|---|---|
| between systems and selves | Caroline Sinders | Poetic sculpture | What would malicious software look like if it had a physical form? |
| ‘Hack Back’ Zine | Joyce Lee | DIY magazine and workbook | How can cybersecurity education become accessible and participatory? |
| The Price is Wrong | Shayna Robinson and Neema Iyer | Mockumentary series | How do people value personal data and everyday security? |
| SweetWire | Greg Niemeyer | Music video and choreography | How can an attack and its containment be understood as a negotiation? |
| Tally | Joelle Dietrick and Owen Mundy | Browser extension | Can online tracking become visible, understandable, and game-like? |
| Virtual Caring | Lauren McCarthy and David Leonard | Participatory installation | What happens when remote care, artificial intelligence, and surveillance enter a home? |
1. between systems and selves: giving malware a body
Artist Caroline Sinders proposed a series of approximately 100 to 1,000 thin wood-and-metal sculptures, each shaped according to characteristics associated with malware. One parameter could be the operating system targeted by a particular piece of malicious software. Instead of depicting malware as a string of code or a cartoon villain, the project would translate its attributes into physical structures.
The proposal drew inspiration from the modernist sculptor Alexander Calder and data-visualization artist Giorgia Lupi. That combination is significant: Calder’s work suggests balance, movement, and carefully engineered form, while Lupi’s approach treats data as something that can be represented with visual nuance rather than reduced to an impersonal chart.
The result was intended to be poetic rather than literal. A viewer would not be looking at a three-dimensional screenshot of a virus. They would be encountering a family of objects whose differences encode the conditions, targets, or behaviors of malware.
For a painter or sculptor, the idea offers a useful creative method: represent an invisible system through its relationships and constraints. The artwork does not need to illustrate every technical detail. It can make the structure of a threat felt through repetition, variation, density, fragility, balance, or material contrast.
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2. ‘Hack Back’ Zine: cybersecurity as a community practice
Joyce Lee proposed an independently produced magazine and workbook focused on the human impacts of cybersecurity. The zine would provide accessible risk-mitigation guidance and be distributed through DIY events.
This approach rejects the assumption that cybersecurity education must look like a corporate training module or a technical manual. A zine can be inexpensive, portable, illustrated, handwritten, collaborative, and easy to adapt to the language and concerns of a particular community. It can invite readers to annotate, answer questions, compare experiences, and share practical steps.
The title’s “hack back” framing also gives the reader a sense of agency, although the project should not be interpreted as advice to retaliate against attackers. In this context, the useful intervention is educational: helping people understand risks and take reasonable steps to protect themselves.
The original CLTC announcement described the zine as a proposed project. It did not establish a currently available commercial edition, so it is more accurate to discuss it as an artistic and educational concept than as a book readers can necessarily purchase today.
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Shayna Robinson and Neema Iyer planned The Price is Wrong as a three-part mockumentary series set in an African context. Participants would answer questions about cybersecurity and digital hygiene while riding in an Uber in Kampala.
The format uses comedy and realism to examine a deceptively difficult question: what is personal data worth to the person giving it away? People may understand that data has value in the abstract, yet still accept an app’s permissions, reuse a password, or share information because the immediate convenience feels more important than a distant risk.
Placing the conversations in a moving vehicle would make cybersecurity social rather than purely instructional. The ride creates a familiar public setting, while the questions can reveal different assumptions about privacy, convenience, trust, and responsibility. The Kampala setting is also essential to the project’s proposed perspective. Cybersecurity is not a universal script that can be detached from local infrastructure, economics, transport, culture, and patterns of technology use.
That attention to context is one of the project’s strongest ideas. A public-awareness artwork works better when it asks how real people navigate security under their actual conditions, not when it simply exports advice written for another audience.
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4. SweetWire: turning an attack into sound and movement
Greg Niemeyer’s SweetWire Music Video Cybersecurity Visualization proposed a musical and choreographed representation of containing a cybersecurity attack. The work would take the form of a dialogue between a hacker and a target.
Its central metaphor is not a single battle with a clearly defined winner. Instead, security becomes an ongoing negotiation between connectivity and protection, and between legitimate and illicit transactions. That is a more accurate artistic frame for much of cybersecurity: networks must remain open enough for useful communication while distinguishing activity that should be trusted from activity that should be blocked or investigated.
The planned production involved UC Berkeley music researchers and Oakland-based music producers from Youth Radio. A collaborative structure makes sense for the subject. Cybersecurity is already an interaction among people, devices, institutions, rules, and automated systems. Music can represent those interactions through call and response, competing rhythms, interruption, repetition, resolution, and dissonance.
For visual artists, the lesson is transferable. Cybersecurity does not need to be painted as a literal server room. It can be expressed as tension between two forces, a choreography of permission and refusal, or a composition in which the system’s defensive response changes the rhythm of the attack.
5. Tally: making online tracking visible and playful
Joelle Dietrick and Owen Mundy proposed Tally as a free, open-source browser extension. Its character—a pink blob named Tally—would warn users when companies turned their online experiences into behavioral data. The project would gamify the tracking and blocking of advertising technologies.
Among the six ideas, Tally has the most direct software component. It addresses a problem many people experience without seeing: websites and advertising systems can observe or infer behavior across online interactions, while the mechanisms involved are often hidden behind technical language, consent banners, and long privacy policies.
The pink blob is an important design choice. A tracker counter or technical dashboard might communicate accurately to specialists while losing everyone else. A recognizable character can provide continuity, emotion, and feedback. Gamification can also turn an abstract privacy issue into a sequence of visible events: something follows, Tally reacts, the user blocks or permits it, and the consequences become easier to understand.
However, Tally should be described carefully. The 2019 announcement documented a proposed free, open-source browser extension; it does not establish that the extension remains available, supported, or compatible with current browsers. The project is valuable here as a model for privacy education and interface design, not as a current software recommendation.
6. Virtual Caring: when care and surveillance occupy the same room
Lauren McCarthy and David Leonard proposed Virtual Caring to examine elder care, artificial intelligence, and surveillance. The planned installation would place remotely controlled cameras, microphones, lights, locks, and appliances in the homes of elderly participants. The artists would act as virtual caregivers while documenting the experience with 360-degree cameras.
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The proposal places convenience and intimacy in direct tension. Remote control can help someone manage a home or receive assistance, but cameras and microphones can also transform private life into an observable stream. Connected locks and appliances may offer practical support while creating new points of dependence and vulnerability.
The project’s ethical questions are more important than its technology list:
- Who gives consent, and can that consent be withdrawn easily?
- Does the person receiving care understand what is being recorded and who can watch it?
- Who controls cameras, microphones, locks, and household devices?
- What happens when a helpful system fails, is misused, or is accessed by someone unauthorized?
- How should family members, professional caregivers, researchers, and technology providers divide responsibility?
Virtual Caring was described as an artistic experiment, not a validated elder-care system or consumer service. Its value lies in making the emotional and political stakes of connected care tangible. It asks viewers to consider whether a home remains private when assistance is delivered through remote observation and control.
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They move cybersecurity away from the stereotype
The projects do not treat cybersecurity as a purely technical contest between an attacker and a defender. They locate it in objects, relationships, entertainment, domestic life, education, and commercial systems. This makes the subject broader without making it less serious.
They translate systems instead of merely illustrating them
A painting of a lock may symbolize security, but these proposals go further. They ask what the properties of malware might become in material form, how tracking might behave as a character, or how a cyberattack might unfold as a musical exchange. The form of each artwork reflects the structure of the underlying issue.
They make the audience part of the problem
Viewers are not distant observers. They may be readers deciding whether advice feels usable, passengers discussing data, users choosing whether to block trackers, or participants weighing care against privacy. That participation matters because security decisions are distributed across everyday life.
They expose trade-offs rather than promise perfect protection
Connectivity creates value and risk. Data can provide convenience while enabling surveillance. Remote access can support care while reducing privacy. Defensive controls can block attacks while also interfering with legitimate activity. The winning ideas are strongest when they show these tensions instead of presenting cybersecurity as a simple matter of choosing “safe” technology.
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From the 2019 contest to later cyber-art
The 2019 contest was not an isolated experiment. CLTC later presented finished works through public conversations and continued its Cybersecurity Arts Contest in 2021 and 2023. Its wider program has included cybersecurity imagery, games, and other creative approaches intended to make security more specific, visible, and actionable. CLTC’s later discussion of the 2019 contest provides context for that continuing program.
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Other institutions have pursued related approaches through different media. Virginia Tech’s Commonwealth Cyber Initiative organized a 2024 CyberArts Exhibit at Alexandria’s Torpedo Factory Art Center from October 5, 2024, through January 26, 2025. The exhibit included installations, virtual reality, theatre, discarded smartphones, steganography, misinformation, AI vulnerabilities, and surveillance of emotion data. It is a later contextual example, not an additional winner of the 2019 Berkeley contest. See the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative’s CyberArts Exhibit information.
WithSecure’s Museum of Malware Art offers another contemporary comparison. Its 2024 W/Threatscape installation uses near-real-time malware threat data, a screen, a computer, and gesture recognition to let visitors visualize and interact with otherwise invisible cyberthreats. The museum is located at WithSecure’s Helsinki headquarters and is open by appointment. Explore W/Threatscape.
Brendan Dawes’s The Art of Cybersecurity, commissioned for Trend Micro in 2019, is another related data-art case. Dawes described using threat data, MD5-derived numbers, Processing, and Houdini to represent attacks, protective systems, and the creative possibilities enabled when threats are stopped. His account says the work appeared in exhibitions, was longlisted for the Lumen Prize, and was used in Trend Micro’s brand materials. It is a related example rather than one of the six CLTC winners. Read Dawes’s account of making The Art of Cybersecurity.
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What painters and other artists can learn from these ideas
- Start with a hidden process. Choose something viewers normally cannot see: tracking, authentication, data brokerage, malware behavior, or remote access.
- Find the process’s human consequence. Ask whether it changes trust, privacy, care, autonomy, labor, or the meaning of home.
- Choose a medium that behaves like the subject. Use repetition for data collection, movement for network traffic, material fragility for vulnerability, or participation for consent.
- Keep the audience’s choices visible. Let people encounter permissions, refusals, trade-offs, uncertainty, or consequences rather than receiving a lecture.
- Do not confuse metaphor with technical proof. An artwork can provoke an important security question without claiming to test a product, measure a threat, or provide operational protection.
That final distinction is crucial. None of the six proposals should be presented as a currently supported security tool, commercial artwork, consumer care platform, or completed intervention unless a separate current source verifies that status.
Frequently Asked Questions
Were all six cybersecurity art projects completed and commercially released?
The 2019 CLTC announcement primarily documented selected proposals and planned works. It does not establish that all six became commercially available products or that every project remains accessible today. In particular, the announcement should not be used to present the “Hack Back” zine as a currently available book, “Tally” as a currently supported browser extension, or “Virtual Caring” as a deployable elder-care service.
What was the purpose of Berkeley’s Cybersecurity Arts Contest?
CLTC created the contest through its Daylight Security Research Lab to explore the human impacts of security and provoke discussion about privacy, surveillance, cyberattacks, and malware. It also aimed to move beyond familiar hacker-and-green-code imagery and involve broader audiences in cybersecurity conversations.
Which of the six projects was most directly about online privacy?
“Tally,” by Joelle Dietrick and Owen Mundy, was the most directly software-oriented privacy project. It proposed using a pink blob character in an open-source browser extension to make behavioral tracking and advertising technologies more visible and game-like.
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Are the later Virginia Tech and WithSecure projects part of Berkeley’s six winners?
No. Virginia Tech’s 2024 CyberArts Exhibit and WithSecure’s Museum of Malware Art are later or related examples showing how cybersecurity and art continued to intersect. They are contextual parallels, not additional winners of the 2019 CLTC contest.
The Bottom Line
The six Berkeley winners show that cybersecurity can be painted, sculpted, performed, played, published, and experienced inside a home. Their shared achievement is not making digital threats decorative. It is giving abstract systems enough physical, social, and emotional form that people can question who controls them, who is exposed by them, and what protection should mean.
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