Massive Attack to condemn Palantir during upcoming Primavera Sound set

Massive Attack have spoken about their upcoming performance at Primavera Sound in Barcelona on Thursday, where they plan to condemn software company Palantir through a specially designed visual installation.

The performance will feature custom-made facial recognition software that scans the festival crowd and selects individuals to be displayed on large screens. Accompanying labels such as “11 weeks, no time off, burnout” will appear alongside the selected faces, meant to imitate the company’s surveillance and data-driven profiling.

“We really need a much wider debate on the suitability of a company like this having such capture of our societal infrastructure,” frontman Rob Del Naja said in an interview with Novara Media ahead of the performance.

“One visual element represents how a Palantir Gotham monitoring and ‘decision chain’ interface might look,” Del Naja explained. “Using facial recognition technology, it lands on groups and individuals – implying a consequential outcome for a given target.”

Palantir is a tech company co-founded by Peter Thiel, a prominent right-wing figure in U.S. politics. The company specialises in large-scale data analysis and surveillance software, with clients including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other government organisations.

In 2023, the NHS signed a contract with Palantir to provide a new data-sharing platform, a partnership widely criticised. They are also a big contributor to the Israeli military and thus an active contributor to the genocide in Gaza.

Massive Attack are an English trip-hop collective formed in Bristol in the late 1980s. Widely regarded as pioneers of the genre, they have released five studio albums along with numerous EPs, singles and collaborative projects.