The MoMA recently acquired the exhibitionDear Data, a joint collaboration between Stefanie Posavec and Giorgia Lupi. Stefanie describes herself as “an artist whose medium is data.” For 52 weeks, the two artists collected data on the intimate interactions of daily life. They initiated and sought to learn about each other via the medium of self-collected and self-reported data. Each artist would provide a visualization and a key, before shipping off little parcels of data across the Atlantic. The pair explored topics ranging from the number of times they looked at the clock, to the number of physical interactions, the number of apologies in a week, and the number of thank-yous — an entire friendship communicated through data.
Part of the beauty of theDear Dataproject is its intentionality. Data acquisition on “human behaviour” is most often a byproduct — information collected passively to track where we spend our money, what ads we click, what we read online, what phone calls we make, emails we send, messages we read. And yet, there is an entire sphere where data has not yet encroached. There are (as of yet) no apps to track our indecision, the number of animals on a neighborhood stroll, our moments of impatience, or the number of times we laugh.Dear Datastrives to capture the beauty of these daily rhythms through the unlikely medium of data.
Stefanie and Giorgia refer to the project as “Little data” in contrast to the omnipresent “big data.” The pervasiveness of datafication is inescapable. What we eat is tracked at the grocery store, school attendance and grades are stored online, even our spontaneous late night purchases of several years ago are likely whirring away on a corporate database.
And yet, the mistake of the big data revolution is the tendency to equate new data with new information, and a still further leap to imply that collecting data translates tomeaning. We don’t learn new things about ourselves from the apps. We know what we buy, but human motivation remains obscured. Attendance records may be tallied, but databases miss the underlying reason such as illness or family dynamics. Furthermore, often the meaningful relationships in our lives are predicted by the absence of data. Facebook can tell when people are suddenly in a relationship, because the profile picture views drop to zero, the flirty comments are no more. The data encodes this as an abrupt phase transition: from the pixelated world into the territory of flesh and blood.
