We need art to understand data
How to call dominant narratives into question through arts, data and storytelling.
From the recording of our very first heartbeat, we are producing recorded evidence. Counting is at the very essence of who we are, and today we’re part of one vast and constant investigation.
In what many refer to as the age of the “quantified self” we seek self-knowledge through self-tracking, counting steps, hours of sleep, and calories consumed, whilst friendships are turned into metrics, and one can backtrack through the past of any new acquaintance on a digital timeline.
When people agree on a standard of measurement, they can coordinate their actions. Measurement is a social agreement, intrinsically linked to history and politics, from Boris Johnson reinstating imperial measurement to rally national pride and a sense of belonging, to the height requirements that determine one’s right to enter certain professions.
In this though, we might want to be wary. As Einstein put it “Time and space are modes by which we think and not conditions in which we live.” The human experience is not only formed from linear rationality, there are nuances. We are inconsistent, emotional, confused, and irrational, even if we have more access to information and self-regulation than ever.
There was a time not so long ago when minutes, metres and megabytes didn’t seem so vital. The sun still rose each morning, we still fell in love, felt fear, and learned from our mistakes (sometimes). Here I invite you to imagine a world without measurement. How would you quantify your human experience?
You might find another way to count; conversations shared, steps taken, words spoken, books read. Outlandish as that may sound in the sober realms of measurement, these are the experiences that colour our cold, grey minutes and shape our perception.
Weaving an emotionally engaging story with data can bring insight into how human creativity will be essential to ensuring that the abundance of information humans will create can have a positive social impact.
Numerical data is notoriously dull, but it is so powerful in creating a platform for debate and lobbying for change, and so bringing life to the torrent of numbers is crucial. Numbers are infinite, but our capacity to emote with them declines progressively as they increase. It becomes harder and harder to connect with an experience that is not tied to one individual story.
When our leaders and institutions validate decisions based on statistics, be it bloody conflicts over kilometres, or laws determining one’s right to make decisions over their own body, conceptual units of measurement determine and account for our lived reality. But what if by bringing emotion to these numbers we could give a more honest account of our society?
This is where the role of art and storytelling is essential. It’s within this creative expression that we search for reassurance that we share our uncertain human existence and that we can develop a personal connection to an idea we have no direct experience of.
From ancient mythology to brand narratives, we are storytellers, and storychasers, by nature.
Whether finding role models in cartoon superheroes, following celebrity breakups or reading the heartbroken poetry of a romantic who died centuries ago, art allows us to connect personally with other lives, real or imagined. From ancient mythology to brand narratives, we are storytellers, and storychasers, by nature.
And yet, we’ve never been further from our essence. You only need to look back at the manic refreshing of live case trackers in the spring of 2020 as the public demanded statistics to locate themselves in the chaos, to realise that data has become our lighthouse. Just as ancient Greeks quieted their innate human anxieties with fables of a pantheon of Gods in the sky, today data is the all-seeing, all-uniting force. But whilst one can look at a number and understand hypothetically what it represents, we’ll never feel it without a story.
So, we are condemned to a bleak future, dissociated from our empathy, and computing the world around us in hyper-rational ones and zeros. Maybe not. In awakening the figures we log all around us through creative and participative artwork, there lies the opportunity to make fairer use of all this information.
I would like to focus on how this can be beneficial in representing marginalised experiences that have struggled for a voice throughout history. Stories that were not given enough of a platform, such as those of people living with mental illness or survivors of sexual violence.
Enter a creative studio from Barcelona doing just that, and reshaping our relationship with information in the process. Domestic Data Streamers (DDS) is an interdisciplinary group of self-proclaimed “misfits” bringing data to life through creative and interactive storytelling.
In their 2021 exhibition You Had to Be a Feminist, they sought to make tangible the enduring everyday sexism that goes unchallenged and drives the contemporary feminist movement. The final piece within the exhibition was composed of a series of receipt printers hung from the ceiling, all linked to a QR code which visitors could scan, and answer the question: “How have you suffered from sexism?”. Each submission would contribute to a curtain of stories (2,878 in total), falling from the machines in real-time, and divided by age range.
The interactive nature of the exhibition created a uniting vulnerability between all those visiting the space, having reflected on the same information in each of the previous rooms that held immersive pieces related to topics such as gender violence in the home or workplace. Participants were placed in the shoes of those around them through the time spent together, and the receipts and their familiar appearance reinforced the sad commonality of these sexual aggressions.
The interactive nature of the exhibition created a uniting vulnerability between all those visiting the space, having reflected on the same information in each of the previous rooms that held immersive pieces related to topics such as gender violence in the home or workplace.
In a society of dopamine overload and general overstimulation, it is common to find audiences numbed to shocking words, numbers or images. These creative elements bring statistics to life, giving them a recognisable form and challenging the othering that comes about all too often when we hear numbers that represent traumatic experiences.
Many DDS installations set out to deconstruct concepts that hold a great many nuanced interpretations, yet form the basis of very fixed social agreements e.g. gender, normality, or power. How these terms are navigated is often a reflection of institutionalised attitudes and ways of thinking.
Violence, for example, is a deeply divisive term in our everyday vocabulary, and arguably an intrinsic part of human existence, yet maybe for that very reason, pinning it down to one objective definition is not so easy.
Stepping through the doors of the exhibition 730 hours of Violence, to my right an endless sheet of paper circulated on an infinite loop, passing through a printer and prompting visitors to impress their own vision of what violence looks like onto the sheet. Together we generated a collage of our initial shared perception upon entering the space.
All the while, we were distracted by a jarring beat that invited curious ears towards three motorised hammers wearing away at the gallery wall. Each one represented a hate term, and every time it was shared by a user on twitter the hammer swung down onto the gradually eroding surface. It was a stark metaphor for the real world consequences of digital actions, visualising the hidden violence of language that compounds online.
Unity is felt through both collective creation and deconstruction. It can empower us and break down traditional structures of ownership over language, and our resulting perceptions of the society we live in. This was equally present in the aforementioned exhibition on feminism, where visitors progressively erased the hate term ‘Feminazi’ by removing cards stuck to the wall. Each held information overleaf about the often inconspicuous force language has in demonising certain movements or demographics.
The public space was the arena in which DDS began to exhibit interactive artwork almost ten years ago, mapping the feelings and opinions of people they shared their streets with. One of their latest public works, Conversations on Suicide touched on a subject that is highly stigmatised in our society but increasingly present, particularly among young people. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), suicide was the second leading cause of death among 15–29-year-olds globally in 2020.
To approach this subject they built a white cube that held 62 ringing telephones and positioned it as an incongruous interruption on the Mediterranean promenade of Badalona. Through a familiar action of answering a call, passersby were able to connect their own life to the 62 suicide attempts that official figures inform us take place in Catalonia each week. The voice on the other end of the line was someone with direct experience of this epidemic. Through the simple act of picking up a phone, participants could recognise the impact that an everyday domestic action can have on a wider scale, and that a conversation could in fact save someone’s life.
In the public space, these interventions powerfully convey how interconnected our lives are, by stirring our instinctive empathy for stories. In amplifying the voices of survivors there is the possibility to open a debate and drive changes in public perception.
Weaving an emotionally engaging story with data can bring insight into how human creativity will be essential to ensuring that the abundance of information humans will create can have a positive social impact. We cannot stop the advances of cold technology but we can marry them with empathy to create something profound. What I have learned from these installations goes far beyond the walls of a gallery, and has redefined the way I understand data as a resource and a representation of our shared reality.
