July 5, 2013 5:44 pm
FT
By Gillian Tett
Some artists are
starting to blend statistics, graphics and design into a new creative pastiche
Acouple of years ago R
Luke DuBois, a New York composer and artist, joined a clutch of American dating
sites. He was not, however, looking for love. Instead, DuBois scooped up data
about the words that would-be lovers used to describe themselves online.
Then he fed the
information into a computer, which identified the most popular phrases used in
different locations of America, and superimposed these results on to maps to
create a new type of “art”. “I have an abiding interest in using information to
investigate emotional value and the way that we are connecting [to each
other],” DuBois earnestly explained to an audience at the Aspen Ideas Festival
in Colorado last week, clad in the geek’s garb of black T-shirt and jeans. Or
as Peter Hirshberg, the head of Re:Imagine, the consultancy, added, “What
[people like DuBois] are doing is trying to convey the secret life of data in a
way that is elegant and exciting … we have gone from a very literal view of
data to a very emotional view.”
Welcome to a curious
new twist – and collision – that is under way in the art world today. A decade
ago, most people assumed that computer geeks and data scientists lived in a
distinctly different mental world from bohemian artists. The task of slapping
paint on to a canvas is very different from constructing computer algorithms;
spreadsheets are not usually associated with wild visual creativity, least of
all when they involve Big Data.
But these days this
divide is starting to crumble in some trendy quarters of New York, London,
Berlin and Aspen. Most notably, as the volume of digital data keeps exploding
in size, some artists such as DuBois, Casey Reas, Siebren Versteeg and Rafael
Lozano-Hemmer are starting to use Big Data as the raw material for their art,
blending statistics, computer graphics and visual design into a new creative
pastiche. The results are not just beautiful but also distinctly provocative,
particularly given the degree to which data collection has become central to
our lives, with or without the antics of Prism or the NSA.
In Aspen, for
example, there were displays of cinematic art that have been created by
collating data on all the flights that take place in American airspace over 24
hours; the places are depicted as moving streaks of light on a computer screen,
which fragment and coalesce in hauntingly beautiful ghostly patterns. Another
piece of art depicts all the hotels across the world, as captured by corporate
hospitality data, as a pastiche of light. Artists have “painted” the Iraq war
by streaming dots on a computer display that represent the military casualties,
day by day. They have played with biometric data to create moving light
displays and used corporate statistics to create beautiful lattice designs.
A team in New York is
now using Twitter data
to create digital “pictures” that capture how cyber conversations develop and
topics trend on social media, in a visually arresting and beautiful way. “We
can now visualise how conversations flow,” Jer Thorp, a
computer-geek-cum-artist explained in Aspen, as he proudly unveiled his images
of Twitter threads spreading through cyberspace. “We can say that’s a spiky
conversation, or a bushy conversation.” Or to put it another way, what this art
aims to do is give a visual form to a hitherto formless, abstract idea – and
highlight the intrinsic beauty in those electronic flows.
Now, I daresay some
FT readers might question whether this really counts as proper art. After all,
these creations do not involve manual craftsmanship in the traditional sense.
And in the interests of disclosure I should admit that when I saw that Aspen
was debating the “Art of Data”, I assumed this was a management discussion
about Big Data mining techniques, rather than anything truly creative; art and
algorithms are not usually associated in the mind.
. . .
But there again, as
men such as Hirshberg point out, artists have always tried to use new
technologies and ideas for inspiration. Just think, for example, of how Andy
Warhol used the (then) new medium of consumer advertising in
the 1960s to create his iconic painting, or how cubists responded to imported
African art a century ago to depict the world in new ways. I, for one, very
much hope that this new field of data art keeps swelling in size. I also hope
this trend helps us all realise that creativity does not always need to hang on
a museum wall; smartphones can display art too. But most important of all, I
would urge more companies and governments to let their raw data be used in this
art (at present, the level of co-operation tends to vary wildly). Who knows? If
artists could get inside that controversial Prism program, they might yet find
some visual beauty there too; or, at the very least, force us to reflect on how
data has stealthily become ubiquitous in our lives – albeit in ways that we
rarely visualise, let alone gaze upon on with a truly contemplative eye.
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