[spectre] DATA DRIFT Exhibition Oct 9 - Nov 22, 2015, in Riga
Rasa Smite
rasa at rixc.lv
Fri Oct 9 16:47:38 CEST 2015
Hello!
With greetings from Riga - where currently we are listening Lev
Manovich's talk in Renewable Futures conference - i am sending this
announcement about the opening of the exhibition - DATA DRIFT (tonight
at 7pm),
You are very welcome to visit Riga and see the exhibition, which will be
open till November 22, 2015
best
Rasa
RIXC.ORG
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DATA DRIFT
Exhibition
October 10 – November 22, 2015
Opening: October 9, 2015 at 19:00
Venue: kim? Contemporary Art Centre in Riga
http://rixc.org/en/festival/DATA%20DRIFT/
DATA DRIFT exhibition showcases works by some of the most influential
data designers of our time, as well as by artists who use data as their
artistic medium. How can we use the data medium to represent our complex
societies, going beyond "most popular," and "most liked"? How can we
organize the data drifts that structure our lives to reveal meaning and
beauty? How to use big data to "make strange," so we can see past and
present as unfamiliar and new?
If painting was the art of the classical era, and photograph that of the
modern era, data visualization is the medium of our own time. Rather
than looking at the outside worldwide and picturing it in interesting
ways like modernist artists (Instagram filters already do this well),
data designers and artists are capturing and reflecting on the new data
realities of our societies.
Curated by Lev MANOVICH, Rasa SMITE and Raitis SMITS, the DATA DRIFT
exhibition is featured event in this year's RIXC Art Science Festival
programme, taking place in Riga from October 8 to 10, 2015. The DATA
DRIFT exhibition is produced by RIXC Center for New Media Culture, which
in its 15th anniversary is changing the title and the course of its
annual festival: from the 90s network culture and “art+communication”
ideas the festival now is making a shift towards broader art and science
fields. On this occasion, we also have launched new conference series –
Renewable Futures, and published new volume of Acoustic Space series –
DATA DRIFT. Archiving Media and Data Art in the 21st century
(http://acousticspacejournal.com).
DATA DRIFT exhibition includes artworks and data visualizations by SPIN
Unit (EU), Moritz STEFANER (DE), Frederic BRODBECK (DE), Kim ALBRECHT
(DE), Boris MÜLLER (DE), Marian DÖRK (DE), Benjamin GROSSER (US),
Maximilian SCHICH (DE/US), Mauro MARTINO (IT/US), Periscopic (US), Pitch
Interactive (US), Smart Citizen Team (ES), Lev MANOVICH / Software
Studies Initiative (US), Daniel GODDEMEYER (DE/US), Dominikus BAUR (DE),
Mehrdad YAZDANI (US), Alise TIFENTALE (LV/US), Jay CHOW (US),
Semiconductor (UK), Rasa SMITE, Raitis SMITS/RIXC (LV), Martins RATNIKS
(LV), Kristaps EPNERS (LV).
The Exhibition Opening programme includes public talk in the Renewable
Futures conference by the exhibition curator Lev MANOVICH, that takes
place on October 9th at 17:00 at the Stockholm School of Economics in
Riga. The talk is followed by the official opening of the exhibition at
19:00 in the kim? Contemporary Art Center.
The DATA DRIFT exhibition will be open from October 10 to November 22,
2015 in Riga.
Opening: October 9, 2015 at 19:00
Venue: kim? Contemporary Art Center gallery, Maskavas street 12, Spikeri
Creative Quartier, Riga, Latvia. Opening hours: Mo – closed, Tue
12:00-20:00 (free entrance), Wed–Sun 12:00-18:00.
More info:
http://rixc.org
http://rixc.org/en/festival/ - RIXC Art Science Festival website
http://renewablefutures.net - Renewable Futures conference
Contact: rixc (at) rixc.org, +371-67228478 (RIXC office),
rasa (at) rixc.org, +371-26546776 (Rasa Smite, RIXC festival and DATA
DRIFT exhibition co-curator)
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DATA DRIFT Exhibition Artists and Artworks
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A SENSE OF PLACE (2015)
SPIN Unit
When we talk about the urban fabric, we are led to consider the urban
landscape as a physical arrangement defined by objects, voids and their
visible relations. For decades, the field of urban morphology has sought
to unveil, measure and study these relations to learn more about the
evolution of the city form. At the same time Social media has become a
common feature of our everyday life. For researchers, social media
provides large amounts of readily accessible, on-time and qualitatively
rich data that can be used to study urban activities and people’s
interactions. The specific characteristics of different forms of social
media, such as Twitter, Instagram and Foursquare, open different avenues
for both quantitative and qualitative analysis.
In this work we are aim to hack the invisible city, leverage the secret
strengths of urban spaces, and explore how the many characters, all the
different layers of the urban fabric come together.
Aiming to combine art and science to study urban phenomena, SPIN Unit
has coalesced into an international network of professionals. Although
based in Tallinn, SPIN currently has ten members across Europe.
http://www.spinunit.eu
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THE EXCEPTIONAL AND THE EVERYDAY: 144 HOURS IN KYIV (2014)
Lev Manovich (USA), Mehrdad Yazdani (USA), Alise Tifentale (Latvia /
USA), Jay Chow (USA)
“The Exceptional and the Everyday: 144 hours in Kyiv” is the first
project to analyze the use of Instagram during a social upheaval using
computational and visualization techniques. We explore how during the
exceptional events, the exceptional co-exists with the (Instagram)
everyday. The visualization shown in the exhibition includes all 13,208
images shared by 6,165 Instagram users in central part of Kyiv during
February 17–22, 2014 (the week of 2014 Maidan Revolution). The images
are organized by shared date/time, top to bottom and left to right. The
images of Maidan clashes, political slogans, and burned cars and
buildings appear right next to everything else. People continue their
lives and post their “likes” as on any other day. The exceptional
co-exists with the everyday. We saw this in the collected images, and
this was our motivation to begin this project.
Dr. Lev Manovich is the author of seven books including The Language of
New Media (The MIT Press, 2001). Manovich is a Professor at The Graduate
Center, CUNY, and a Director of the Software Studies Initiative. In 2014
he was included in the list of 50 "most interesting people building the
future" (The Verge). Dr. Mehrdad Yazdani is research scientist in
Qualcomm Institute at California Institute for Telecommunication and
Information, University of California, San Diego (UCSD).
Alise Tifentale is a doctoral candidate in Art History at the Graduate
Center, CUNY. Her academic research as well as curatorial and editorial
work is focused on photography in art and popular visual culture.
Jay Chow is web developer in Katana, San Diego, CA, and researcher in
Software Studies Initiative.
http://www.the-everyday.net
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STADTBILDER (2013)
Moritz Stefaner (Germany)
Stadtbilder presents an attempt to map the digital shape of cities.
While traditional maps show us buildings, roads and physical
infrastructure, these maps reveal where and in which form the city is
alive. The maps show an overlay of all the digitally marked “hotspots”
in a city, such as restaurant, hotels, clubs, etc. collected from online
services like yelp and foursquare. What they don’t show are the streets,
the railroads, the buildings. The only exception are the rivers and
lakes, for their help in framing the information for the viewer and the
influence they have on shaping the cities.
Moritz Stefaner works as a “Truth and Beauty Operator” on the crossroads
of data visualization and information aesthetics. With a background in
Cognitive Science and Interface Design, his work balances analytical and
aesthetic aspects in mapping complex phenomena.
http://uberblic.com (The data is sourced from Uberblic)
http://stadt-bilder.com (Project website)
http://truth-and-beauty.net (Author's website)
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CINEMETRICS (2011)
Frederic Brodbeck (Germany)
Cinemetrics is a project about gathering and visualizing video data, in
order to reveal the visual characteristics of films and to create a
“fingerprint” for them. Information such as the editing structure, color
and motion are extracted, analyzed and transformed into animated
graphical representations, so that movies can be seen as a whole, and
compared side by side. Since motion pictures are a time-based medium,
they can only be seen one image at a time – that’s why it’s challenging
to capture and display them in their entirety. With its graphical
fingerprints, Cinemetrics allows you to put two or more movies next to
each other and immediately see the similarities and / or differences,
for instance: original vs. remake; movies of the same genre / series;
different epochs of film-making; movies by one particular director.
Frederic Brodbeck studied graphic design in Germany and the Netherlands.
He currently works as designer and creative coder in The Hague.
http://cinemetrics.fredericbrodbeck.de/
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ON BROADWAY (2014)
Daniel Goddemeyer (Germany/USA), Moritz Stefaner (Germany), Dominikus
Baur (Germany), Lev Manovich (USA)
The interactive installation and web application On Broadway represents
life in the 21st-century city through a compilation of 40 million data
points and social media images covering the 13 miles of Broadway that
span Manhattan. The result is a new type of city view, created from the
activities and media shared by hundreds of thousands of people. How we
can best represent a “data city”? We did not want to show the data in a
conventional way as graphs and numbers. We also did not want to use
another convention of showing spatial data – a map. The result of our
explorations is “On Broadway”: a visually rich image-centric interface,
where numbers play only a secondary role, and no maps are used. The
project proposes a new visual metaphor for thinking about the city: a
vertical stack of image and data layers. There are 13 such layers in the
project, all aligned to locations along Broadway. Using our unique
interface, you can see all data at once, or zoom and follow Broadway
block by block.
Daniel Goddemeyer is a freelance visualization designer; exploring the
cultural impacts of
ubiquitous access to information to create new products and services.
M.A. Royal College of Art. Moritz Stefaner is an independent consultant
in information visualization / Truth and Beauty Operator. M.A. in
Interface Design, B.Sc. in Cognitive Science. Dominikus Baur is a data
visualization and mobile interaction designer, Ph.D. in Media
Informatics from the University of Munich. Lev Manovich is an expert on
digital art and culture; Professor of Computer Science, The Graduate
Center, CUNY; Director, Software Studies Initiative.
http://on-broadway.nyc
http://on-broadway.nyc/app
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CULTUREGRAPHY (2014)
Kim Albrecht, Boris Müller, Marian Dörk (Germany)
Culturegraphy is interactive web-tool that investigates cultural
information exchange over time also known as 'memes'. These networks can
provide new insights into the rich interconnections of cultural
development. Treating cultural works as nodes and influences as directed
edges, the visualization of these cultural networks can provide new
insights into the rich interconnections of cultural development. The
graphics represent complex relationships of movie references by
combining macro views summarizing 100 years of movie influences with
micro views providing a close-up look at the embedding of individual
movies. The macro view shows the rise of the self-referential character
of postmodern cinema, while the micro level illustrates differences
between individual movies, when they were referenced and by whom. The
visualizations provide views that are closer to the real complexity of
the relationships than aggregated views or rankings could do.
Kim Albrecht is a visual researcher and information designer, currently
based in Boston, working at the Center for Complex Network Research as a
visualization researcher. Culturegraphy work is created in collaboration
with graphic designer Boris Müller and information visualization
researcher and designer Marian Dörk.
http://kimalbrecht.com/
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COMPUTERS WATCHING MOVIES (2013)
Benjamin Grosser (USA)
Computers Watching Movies shows what a computational system sees when it
watches the same films that we do. The work illustrates this vision as a
series of temporal sketches, where the sketching process is presented in
synchronized time with the audio from the original clip. Viewers are
provoked to ask how computer vision differs from their own human vision,
and what that difference reveals about our culturally-developed ways of
looking. Why do we watch what we watch when we watch it? Will a system
without our sense of narrative or historical patterns of vision watch
the same things?
Computers Watching Movies was computationally produced using software
written by the artist. This software uses computer vision algorithms and
artificial intelligence routines to give the system some degree of
agency, allowing it to decide what it watches and what it does not. Six
well-known clips from popular films are used in the work, enabling many
viewers to draw upon their own visual memory of a scene when they watch
the work. The scenes are from the following movies: 2001: A Space
Odyssey, American Beauty, Inception, Taxi Driver, The Matrix, and Annie
Hall.
Artist Benjamin Grosser focuses on the cultural, social, and political
implications of software. Grosser’s recognitions include First Prize in
VIDA 16, the Expanded Media Award for Network Culture from Stuttgarter
Filmwinter, and a commission from Rhizome.
https://bengrosser.com/
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CHARTING CULTURE (2014)
Maximilian Schich (Germany / USA), Mauro Martino (Italy / USA)
This animation distills hundreds of years of culture into just five
minutes. A team of historians and scientists wanted to map cultural
mobility, so they tracked the births and deaths of notable individuals
like David, King of Israel, and Leonardo da Vinci, from 600 BC to the
present day. Using them as a proxy for skills and ideas, their map
reveals intellectual hotspots and tracks how empires rise and crumble.
The information comes from Freebase, a Google-owned database of
well-known people and places, and other catalogues of notable
individuals. The visualization was created by Maximilian Schich
(University of Texas at Dallas) and Mauro Martino (IBM Research).
Mauro Martino is an Italian expert in data visualization based in
Boston. He created and leads the Cognitive Visualization Lab at IBM
Watson in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Maximilian Schich is an art historian and Associate Professor in Arts &
Technology and a founding member of The Edith O'Donnell Institute of Art
History at The University of Texas at Dallas.
http://www.mamartino.com
http://www.schich.info/
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U.S. GUN KILLINGS: THE STOLEN YEARS (2013)
Periscopic (USA)
Using data from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime
Report, this data visualization and exploration tool visualizes the gun
murders that took place in 2010 and 2013, the most recent years for
which data was available.The Uniform Crime Report includes
voluntarily-reported data from police precincts across the country, and
represents more than 285 million U.S. inhabitants – 94.6% of the total
population, containing details of each person who was killed, including
their age, gender, race, relationship to killer, and more. What the
dataset does not contain is an assessment of the potential life that was
stolen from these individuals as a result of their murder. To calculate
that, we used the World Health Organization’s UNSD Demographic
Statistics, and performed an age prediction weighted according to the
age distribution of U.S. deaths, paired with a likely cause of death at
that age. We’ve added near real-time data for gun deaths in 2013. While
the data isn’t from a source that is as official as the FBI, it does
help us get an idea of the gun-related violence that happens every day.
The 2013 data also includes suicides and gun accidents, and offers a
more comprehensive understanding of the effect of guns in our country.
Periscopic is a socially-conscious data visualization firm that helps
companies and organizations promote information transparency and public
awareness.
http://www.periscopic.com
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OUT OF SIGHT, OUT OF MIND (2013)
Pitch Interactive (USA)
A web based narrative visualization documenting every drone strike
carried out in Pakistan. Out of Sight, Out of Mind was inspired by the
inadequacies of other attempts to report the effects of an invisible
technological war. Using data from the Bureau of Investigative
Journalism we visualized every known attack by the US and Coalition
military since 2004 by date, location and number of fatalities. The
visualization builds itself as each attack generates the timeline across
the screen. The viewer can dig deeper by hovering or clicking in to
reveal specific details about each attack on the horizontal timeline.
The 'Victims' tab provides an alternate view showing the aggregated
number of victims by month. In both views the data produces patterns
that urge viewers to reflect on realities hidden by the numbers.
Pitch Interactive's work spans illustrations, physical installations,
projections, console game user interfaces, software applications,
websites and textiles. Their work has been showcased at the MoMA's
TalkToMe exhibit in New York, the Data Flow books and many other
exhibitions internationally acclaimed publications.
http://pitchinteractive.com
SMART CITIZEN (2012 – present)
Smart Citizen Team
Smart Citizen is a crowd sensing project that started in 2012 to develop
bottom-up citizen science tools under an open source philosophy,
facilitating every citizen to learn about open data, programming,
computer science, internet of things, and more importantly: about social
and political change through technology, encouraging participatory
urbanism and activism practices. The Smart Citizen project is based on
geolocation, Internet and free hardware and software for data collection
and sharing, and (in a second phase) the production of objects; it
connects people with their environment and their city to create more
effective and optimized relationships between resources, technology,
communities, services and events in the urban environment. It is also a
platform to generate participatory processes of the people in the
cities. Connecting data, people and knowledge, the objective of the
platform is to serve as a node for building productive open indicators
and distributed tools, and thereafter the collective construction of the
city for its own inhabitants.
Smart Citizen is an open source participatory sensing platform that
comprises a sensor kit (SCK), an online platform and a mobile
application. The project was launched in 2012, instigated by the Fab Lab
Barcelona, the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC),
Hangar art production center, Media Interactive design (MID) and Goteo
crowd-funding platform.
https://smartcitizen.me/
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BAND 9 (2015)
Semiconductor (UK)
Band 9 is a light box installation that considers nature within the
framework of science. Nine light boxes show scientific cloud data, which
have been captured from space by a remote sensing satellite, orbiting
the Earth. Using optical sensors it collects reflected light in various
wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum. By focusing on very thin
slices of these, scientists can pinpoint individual phenomena such as
the band we see here, which is designed to reveal high-altitude clouds
called Cirrus. What we see in the images is dictated by the capturing
technology; the satellite scans in 115 mile wide swathes orbiting the
earth from north to south and anything beyond the dedicated wavelengths
is swallowed into a black void. The angle the light boxes are installed
reflects the incline the data has been captured and archived at. By
presenting the raw satellite data using techniques informed by the
capturing technology Semiconductor are, exploring how technologies that
are made to study nature, mediate our experiences and understanding of it.
Semiconductor is UK artist duo Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt. In their
work they explore the material nature of our world and how we experience
it through the lens of science and technology, questioning how they
mediate our experiences of nature.
http://semiconductorfilms.com
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TALK TO ME. HUMAN-PLANT COMMUNICATION (2011–2015)
Rasa Smite, Raitis Smits, Martins Ratniks (Latvia)
Talk to Me is an artistic inquiry into human and plant communication,
yet also scientists have nowadays performed various experiments in order
to verify the old assumption that communicative with plants makes them
grow better. RIXC artists developed a human-plant communication
interface, by using which people were asked to send encouraging messages
to the growing plants, who grew in different exhibition venues, and were
"equipped" with web-cam, wi-fi and loudspeakers. We received over 13 000
messages during the two-year period of the human-plant communication
experiment performed in various locations in Tallinn, Basel, Riga and
Ventspils. The outcome of this project is a book, which introduces to
the project idea, performed experiments, and analyses the content of the
received messages. Also an other new artworks now have been created
including time-laps video from web-cam image archive, as well as silk
screen prints and 3D objects mapping the most commonly used words and
their inter-relations, whereby using data as artistic medium.
Rasa Smite and Raitis Smits are artists, curators and cultural
innovators, working with science and emerging media technologies since
mid-90s. They are key founders of RIXC, Riga based center for new media
culture and artist collective, who collaborate with video artist and
graphic designer Martins Ratniks.
http://talktome.rixc.lv
http://rixc.org
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RUN (2015)
Kristaps Epners (Latvija)
The running ritual is everyday practice by the artist. Since 2012, when
running he is taking video camera with him. He compares the running with
writing the diary, where words are replaced with the images and
trajectories of the running path. The work consists of the book, sound
and video, interpreting the data from the artist's running times.
Kristaps Epners is based in Latvia, he has from graduated the Latvian
Academy of Arts, Visual Communication department. The artist mainly
works with video, installation and photography. More recently, he
explores how the cyclical and everyday activities interect with the time.
http://kristapsepners.com
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more info: http://rixc.org
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