“Open Fields will be investigating the use of data visualizations and other mappings of the contemporary. It will look into areas such as open commons, the future of social interaction, data representation and visualisation, critical design, sustainable infrastructures, eco-aesthetics, techno-ecologies, bio-hacking and other techniques of a transformative potential. No Field is excluded, yet there should always be a connection with art; it is highly likely that art works and conference papers will touch on several Fields, not one. It is such an enhanced understanding of transdisciplinarity that drives this undertaking.” http://rixc.org/en/festival/Open%20Fields%20Konference/
VENUE:
From wednesday, September 28 to Saturday, October 1 -2016
at The National Library of Latvia, Mukusalas iela 3
Sandra Alvaro: Artistic Production and Embodied Information. Tracking Spaces of Transformation
Friday, September 30 – 11.45 – 13.00 Parallel Session B (75 min.) Data Visualization
Abstract:
The practice of databasing is overstepping the field of scientific research to spread to all ambits of our culture. This contemporaneous situation is denominated as Big Data, Datification or Data-driven society. Terms defining a situation where our world is abstracted to a set of features, which can be operable by the algorithms of software. Software studies consider the pragmatics and materiality of software, from the point of view of the circuitry that executes its commands and the politics it meshes in (Mathew Fuller).
Here, spaces of transformation (Serres) is denominating fab labs, hackerspaces, citizen labs… from where arises a self-organized culture aimed at the production and disruption of the new technological apparatus, shaping our world. In it, practices as data visualization, physical computing, and additive fabrication become the spaces of a situated knowledge (Haraway) and a new literacy that emerges from the engagement between working with materials and the complex space that emerges. Despite, its engagement with the local, these spaces are spreading globally from Europe (Chaos Computer Group) to China (XinCheJian) and the USA (The Bridge). Cultural Analytics is the use of computational methods for the analysis of massive cultural data sets and flows (Manovich). It allows investigating global culture by means of the visualization of massively produced cultural artifacts. Here I propose the investigation of the culture emerging from these spaces of transformation by means of tracking on the web the material cultural artifacts produced in these spaces as digital objects, visualizations, and assemblages of microprocessors.
Keywords:
Culture Analytics, Software Studies, hacking, data visualization, additive fabrication, material culture