The genesis of data art: Information
A panoramic about the early years of marriage between art and information technology.
Data art is one of those movement that you expect to find in the most innovative and millennials oriented art collectives in places like New York and Amsterdam.
Far from being pretentious, its main objective is to reconcile two very opposing entities, art and information technology. And our generation, maybe more than anyone else before us, recognises itself in the eclectic data visualisations that sprout from processors, machines and information manipulation.
However you would make a big mistake thinking that data art was born lately, together with iPhones and Netflix. In fact, even if this statement may sound too simplistic, it is possible to trace Data Art dawn back to a very singular exhibition, Information.
The exhibition, curated by Trinidad and Tobago-born museum curator Kynaston McShine, brought for the first time in America the artworks of many emerging artists. Silver lining among them was trying to extend the idea of art beyond traditional categories, defeating a more cultural conditioned aesthetic response to art. And they were doing so fully living their time, and all the technological disruptions it meant.
“Those represented are part of a culture that has been considerably altered by communications systems such as television and film, and by increased mobility. Therefore, photographs, documents, films and ideas, which are rapidly transmitted, have become an important part of this new work.” Mr. McShine said.
For McShine, art and information already formed one single progressive movement, in a period literally “made of information.”
The “Information” artists were feral as they recuperated, for the postwar era, the legacy of institutional analysis of Russian constructivism and Duchamp: the context of the artwork is the “work” itself, with all the data that supports it.
Now you may be in a better position to understand why that above statement is not so simplistic afterall: “Information” was indeed the first time an exhibition as such was put together.
Chiara Avino
Feral Content Creator
