PUBLIC MARKS with tag dada

One of the 8 works I created for the Data Art Show at the Pink Hobo Gallery in Minneapolis.

All these pieces are a pun on the new craze for data visualization. The goals of data visualization as I understand them are to make complicated issues more understandable, to make obscured connections visible and to reveal hidden patterns in the data. After all these tasks have been solved ideally the result should be aesthetically pleasing as well.

But when I look around what is being done in data visualization today I have the suspicion that in many cases the design is more important than the actual information and that the use of data is more an excuse to justify the use of aesthetics.

Since I do not have a problem with aesthetics for their own sake in these pieces I deliberately took the opposite direction. Since I wanted to create something visually interesting I made up my own data which would give me the desired results. All these works are the result of generative algorithms, so all the elements and their connections are actually data and not something I assembled manually in Illustrator.

Imaginez un monde transparent, où nos désirs les plus intimes seraient négociés sur un marché global et leurs risques évalués et optimisés.

Le Dadamètre, outil de profiling du langage et de surveillance narrative des mouvements artistiques, annonce une nouvelle alliance entre l'art, la science et une finance globalisée enfin libérée des cataclysmes boursiers.

Utilisant technologies du Web 2.0, réseaux de neurones, théorie des graphes, linguistique quantitative, il permet de cartographier, et bientôt de prédire, tendances artistiques ou mutations sociales.

Valeurs boursières, prises pour paroles d’évangile dans les domaines de l’économie, code d’accès pour échanges d’objets capitalisés chez E-bay, unité de mesure sémantique pour le grand Google : tout est quantifié, mouliné, analysé selon des critères qu’une poignée d’artistes s’emploie à substituer, détourner, ou transposer humour, graphs et cartographies à l’appui.