Imagining Data
Virtual Exhibition
Guest Curators:
Ginger Gregg Duggan and Judith Hoos Fox of
c2-curatorsquared
Data has become a buzzword, and a precious commodity—what we divulge through on-line activity is more valuable than the purchases and transactions we may be making. Our phones and computers offer those who are looking a wealth of data of all kinds. And our current status—personal, societal, political, environmental—can be described in terms of numbers and algorithms. Pollsters and statisticians have busied themselves before, during, and now after the US election, gathering and analyzing data on voters, their predicted and projected behaviors. The Covid 19 pandemic has made statistics an international obsession as we follow contagion, spikes, vaccine efficacy rates and hospital capacities. News outlets offer line, bar, pie-chart graphs, lists of percentages, and more. Data visualization is a discipline onto itself.
Image: PLAYLAB, INC. and Family New York in collaboration with Floating Point; POOL Light, 2019. Image courtesy of artists.
What interests us is the work that artists, around the world, who are showing what data can look like, in paintings, drawings, sculpture, audio-visual installation, fashion and even performance. Some are developing systems to transform data into images, rationalizing the image-making process while creating resonating works of art. Though some of these works are elegantly hard-edged and precise, as one might imagine, many others are remarkably poetic and expressive.
By no means is this a new way to make art. Rationalizing the art-making process has guided image and object making since the middle of the last century. Think Sol LeWitt and Donald Judd. But their systems resulted in their images and objects. Considering chance itself a kind of system may have begun in 1913 with March Duchamp. Remember his Standard Stoppages?
More closely aligned to the work we are seeing now is the work of artists Charles Gaines whose image making is guided by mathematical and numeric systems. This approach matured into his 2007 Greenhouse, a sculptural enclosure whose lights shift according to computer-generated readings of air pollution levels in California. Likewise, Tomàs Saraceno has taken his practice to a planetary scale, dealing with global conditions. Both can be seen as progenitors of this approach—data being the catalyst for image—illustrated in the work we have gathered together for this on-line presentation, Imagining Data.
We are seeing four subject areas that artists are addressing in their data-inspired work.
NATURAL/ENVIRONMENTAL CONDITIONS
In the vein of Charles Gaines’s and Tomàs Saraceno’s work, artists are harvesting data that describes the universe, that records the weather, that monitors environmental conditions. The works in this grouping help us grasp the enormity of the universe and the ever-changing environmental conditions in the atmosphere, to see the shifting power of storms, the cleanliness of water, the rising high water mark in coastal cities. Phenomena too enormous to wrap our minds around become visible in elegant installations, objects, and works on paper.
Jill Baroff; Hurricane Wilma (New York Harbor), 2012
Images courtesy of the artist
Aude Moreau; La ligne bleue, 2014
Photo Aude Moreau
Alicja Biala/Iwo Borkowicz; Totemy, 2019
Photo credit: Alicja Biala / Iwo Borkowicz
Katie Paterson; The Cosmic Spectrum, 2019
© Katie Paterson 2020. Image courtesy of the artist and James Cohan, New York.
Norwood Viviano; Global Cities, 2015-2016
Image courtesy of the artist
Spencer Finch; Cosmic Latte, 2007
Photo by Douglas Mason © Spencer Finch 2020. Image courtesy of the artist and James Cohan, New York.
PLAYLAB, INC. and Family New York in collaboration with Floating Point; POOL Light, 2019
Credit: image by Iwan Bain
PERSONAL BIOMETRICS
What we are made of, how we look, what we feel, what we dream, how we learn, what we do—these are some of the concepts, all challenging to chart and articulate—that artists have tackled in objects, images, even fashion and performance.
Louis Cameron; Amazon #7, 2016
Images courtesy of the artist
Melati Suryodarmo; If we were XYZ, 2019; three hour duration, October 15 and 18, 2019
Image courtesy of the artist
Dario Robleto; Sparrow Sing to an Indifferent Sea, 2019
Photo credit: Julia Featheringill
Alison Tsai; Coding NonStop, 2013
Image courtesy of the artist
Andrew Yang; Stella’s Stoichiometry (All things renewed 40 lbs.), 2019
Image courtesy of the artist
Evan Roth; Since You Were Born, 2020
photo © Jeu de Paume, by François Lauginie
Lee M. Walton; Golf Glove Systems, 2019-2020
Image courtesy of the artist
COMMUNAL MOVEMENT
Population shifts, instigated by political policies and economics, can be seen in this group of works on paper, sculpture, and installations. Immigration and migration, mass movements of large sectors of the population over decades and across the world are visualized clearly and elegantly.
Tiffany Chung; NYT: incidents of lives lost at sea and entries from the tracking of dead & missing by IOM; Missing Migrants Project, 2017
Image courtesy of the artist
Richard Ibghy & Marilou Lemmens; The Prophets, 2013-2015
Images courtesy of the artists
Ben Doessel & James Lee; Ugly Gerry, 2019
Images courtesy of Ben Doessel & James Lee
Giorgia Lupi; The Room of Change, 2019
Photo credits: Pentagram
Ekene Ijeoma; Wage Islands: Immigrants, 2017
Images courtesy of the artist
Yu-Wen Wu; Gold Mountain Prayer, 2015
Images courtesy of the artist
RANDOMIZED CONTENT
Seeking patterns and reasons, looking for rationales, that is what our brains like to do when confronted with random events. Chance is random, or is it? Here we find multi-media endeavors, from elegant to hilarious, to explore the unpredictable.
As always, we are grateful to the artists and their representatives whose generosity with providing images and yes, data, made the project possible.
Ghost of a Dream and Jennifer Dalton; Statistics of Hope (detail), 2018; paint pen drawing on wall; 50 x 198 x 49 inches as installed
Photograph by Raphael Gao
Nina Katchadourian; Talking Popcorn, 2001
Photographs courtesy of the artist
