Data is Never Abstract
A Conversation with Dietmar Offenhuber
We sat down with dietmar offenhuber, Associate Professor at Northeastern University in the departments of Art + Design and Public Policy; Interim Department Chair for the A+D department in College of Arts, Media, and Design; and Center for Design faculty member, to talk about a recent exhibition that he curated with Daria Parkhomenko. The exhibition “New Elements” at the New Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, Russia, organized by Laboratoria Arts & Science Foundation, made in strategic partnership with Kaspersky, is open through February 27th, 2022 and aims to reveal the data inherent to our physical world. Our conversation with Dietmar centered around the exhibition but ranged in topics from cybernetics to embodiment to quantum physics to both data visualization and data physicalization — demonstrating the interdisciplinary knowledge integral to Dietmar’s impressive body of work and one of the many reasons why he is a valued member of the Center for Design community.
A few of Dietmar’s notable achievements and positions include: Key Researcher & Leader of the Interactive Space Group, Ars Electronica Futurelab, Linz, Austria; Advisor, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP); and the Outstanding PhD Dissertation Award, presented by the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning for his dissertation titled “Participatory Infrastructure Monitoring: Design Factors and Limitations of Accountability Technologies.” Just as impressive is his academic background in UrbanPlanning, Interactive Media Art, and Architecture; receiving his PhD from MIT, an MS from the MIT Media Lab, and a Dipl. Ing. in Architecture from the Technical University Vienna.
The physical world is a computer
Throughout his academic career Dietmar has been contemplating the interactions of social and technological systems. In 2017 he published a book titled “Waste is Information: Infrastructure Legibility and Governance” through MIT Press, where he first started to think about the entanglement of information and matter. Trash, and its many classifications, is physical information — it is the trace that we as humans are leaving and have left on this world.
Dietmar gave us some historical examples of the physicality of information to situate his work in a broader set of epistemological contemplations. The idea that you can use the environment as a source of computation is not new, in the second half of the 19th century when photography was the most popular medium, the information of photos was physically imprinted on the photographic plate. The photographic plate held traces of light from the environment, computing the wavelengths of light autographically. The Sherlock Holmes books of the same time period were constructed on the foundational idea that physical traces in the environment are information that may be used as evidence. In the 1950’s and 60’s, the study of cybernetics was popular with cyberneticians like Stafford Beer — whose work included a project using iron filaments in a pond as a computation of what was occurring in that environment, and Gordon Pask who did experiments with a completely liquid chemical computer that creates neuron-like metallic dendrites that interpret signals. Gordon Pask’s project has been reinterpreted by Ralf Baecker in the work titled “A Natural History of Networks / Softmachine” at the exhibition.
Dietmar then explained to us how his recent work, including the exhibition and forthcoming book with MIT press “Autographic Information and Phenomenon,” is a pitch for thinking about computation differently. Computation should not be limited to ideas of CPU and binary states, this view neglects decades of work in the field of computation. Dietmar further illustrated the point by referencing Rodney Brooks, past Director of CSAIL, MIT’s Laboratory of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, who calls Moore’s law “crack cocaine” because it has caused an obsession with the digital metaphor of computers in a way that completely disregards all other conceptions of computation.
In his claim that the world is a physical computer, Dietmar is prompting us to think about computation as a natural process of our environments. Everything that happens is, in some way, recorded by the physical world, which processes information through autographic traces. In thinking about the physical world this way, we are acknowledging that our environments are computing information and are therefore computers.
Data is never abstract.
It is always material, always tangible. This may seem antithetical to central beliefs about data in this day and age, but with Northeastern University College of Arts, Media and Design’s focus on material research, Dietmar is seeking to disrupt the dominant discourses and re-ground ideas of computation in the physical world.
Dietmar broke it down for us… a datum or data point may be defined as the difference between two states of existence, always a measurable relationality. With this, data is actually defined as a tangible object — the physical world is therefore an analog computing machine. The earth leaves traces of its movement and composition in its layers of rock, which geologists still use as data in today’s research practices. This data is literal, we can touch it and feel the difference between the distinct strata of rock. This is autographic information, and “New Elements” is an exhibition of different types of autographic data implicit to our environments.
The process of data generation, in the conventional sense, involves some level of abstraction because there is an attempt to formalize a particular aspect of the system in which the data is taken from. Visualizations are then an additional system of abstraction layered on top of the formalized data which creates visual representations. Data visualization is therefore a few steps removed from the autographic data inherent to our physical environments. The tables of numbers and visualizations that we see everyday in the media are actually representations of physical phenomena. It is the manipulations of the data that we as humans create that is abstract, not the data itself.
Autographic information ≠ data physicalization
Data physicalization is a subfield of data visualization which grew out of a dissatisfaction with the limited expressivity of flat data visualizations. If data visualizations are formal abstractions or representations, then data physicalization just expands this formalization into physical space. In most cases, abstracted data is broken down a bit and turned into something physical, a data sculpture for example, but it is still an abstraction. Both data visualization and physicalization neglect the physical components of how data itself is physical.
This led us into a discussion about embodiment and different forms of knowing. In this context our bodies hold autographic information; the scars on our skin and the memories in our minds are traces of the past. Even the mechanisms that we as humans use to process information are based in the physical world; it is not representations or abstractions that teach us but rather our physical experiences and interactions with them.
Autographic information, on the other hand, is not abstracted or represented; it is arguably more honest, with less room for human bias in its creation. This is because the data is made as an autograph written by the subject of the data itself. The data is what the data is; there are things that occur in our world that simply can not be formalized in language or numbers because of its physical relationality with its environment. “New Elements” is the expression of autographic data, a rejection of data visualization and physicalization, yet still organized, informative, and beautiful.
New Elements
Dietmar expanded upon these ideas in the introduction of one of the pieces at the exhibition, by Finnish artist Tuula Närhinen titled “Drop Tracer.” The project reenacts historical methods of recordization through its capturing of the traces, or autographs, of rain drops as they drip down soot covered glass. Rather than presenting sculptures made with datasets, the exhibition is a provocation for the viewer to rethink not only their physical relationship to data but also the ways in which data may manifest itself in the world around us.
Dietmar will be facilitating a symposium about the exhibition on Saturday February 12th. You can find more information about the exhibition here and read more about the individual pieces of the exhibition on Dietmar’s medium publication .
Dietmar’s work is just one example of the wide array of interdisciplinary projects here at the Center for Design. The artists of the exhibition may not call themselves designers, but they are certainly engaging in design thinking: in the way they choose to frame the traces they’ve recorded, through the methods of information they’ve captured, and through the various disciplines that they needed to engage in the production of their art.
The Center for Design is Northeastern’s platform for interdisciplinary design research; it’s a space for collaborative research activities and a hub for connecting the actors of the design eco-system. It aims at sharing knowledge and practices, shaping common tools and methods, strengthening a unified disciplinary ground.
Written by Nicole Zizzi, Center for Design Northeastern University
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