Bodies of data
This week I went to an arts & culture space called BRIC in Brooklyn as part of a field trip for Data as Material. We were there to see an exhibition called Data Through Design, an annual showcase of projects that creatively analyze, interpret, and interrogate New York City’s Open Data through tangible and multimedia art installations. This year the theme for the exhibition was Corpus — Bodies of Data. The pieces we saw varied greatly in their mediums as well as their interpretation of the theme of ‘bodies.’ From the BRIC website,
“We imagine a dataset as a body of knowledge that indexes people in a community, events in a timeline, or observations in an area. But datasets are also representations of our bodies and the corpora of living things; collections of individuals, bodies of water, natural and human-made systems, the collectivity of the city. How are these bodies of knowledge born, how do they age, grow, and go through cycles – who animates them and do they expire? And, if we look closely enough, can we discern the shapes of individuals within these collectives?”
Out of the ten pieces exhibited, at least two were created by DT students, which was very cool to see. (As a side note, one of my favorite parts of attending Parsons so far has been organically finding our creative work out in the wild, and only realizing the Parsons connection later on.)
The projects that really stood out to me were ones that dealt with uncomfortable or unpleasant topics, and turned data that you might feel inclined to turn away from, into a visual that you wanted to engage with.
One of these was titled Hyperphagia, created by Matías Piña & Arden Schager, two students who are also part of the Design and Technology MFA program at Parsons. Their project focused on the waste created by New York City, where it travels to within the city, and how eventually it leaves us altogether, shipped away to be dealt with elsewhere.
What really struck me about this project was the medium and the aesthetic choices made — in a thematic effort to use waste materials, they exhibited the project on two old small tv screens, and the nature of the medium lended a nostalgic VHS feel to the data being displayed. They structured it almost like a game, drawing parallels to biological organisms in a petri dish, as well as rot and decay, and technological obsolescence.
The medium through which we can explore data has been a big topic for me this semester, especially as I lack any professional data viz training. Exhibits like this really illuminate the world of possibility with data. Along the same vein, I stumbled upon this post the other day titled, Design secrets we can learn from historic visualizations. As always, historical precedents always hit me the hardest — I found the data visualization efforts made by pioneers in the 1800s so deeply inspiring.
Finally, the other big issue that I continue to grapple with is around the questions of what is art? What is design? What is worth making, in terms of being interesting or beautiful to others? What is worth making, in terms of the larger-scale impact on the world?
I think the projects that stood out to me most in the exhibition did so because they sufficiently answered those last two questions. Having a compelling reason to tell a story is the first step in creating something meaningful. The second step is all in the visuals and aesthetics. One without another falls flat, at least according to my personal standards for creative work.