Sarah
Cook
August 2004
What happens when you put a bunch of obsessive-compulsive, taxonomical and cataloguing
preoccupied artists in the same room for a workshop? They are meticulous
in the presentation of their work. They have the best documentation of art projects
imaginable. And you bet it’s all colour-coded and neatly filed away in
their backpacks and briefcases at the end of their talks.
The workshop held at Angel Row Gallery for their forthcoming exhibition Day-to-Day
Data (summer 2005) brought together 10 artists who collect or approximate
data, then analyse or manipulate it, and lastly make it visible (or audible
or tangible) for an audience. Over the course of discussing their proposals
for new art works, these two axes (collect or approximate; analyse or manipulate)
joined together with a number of others which made it possible to plot artistic
practice on a multi-layered table; creating an index if you like, of the artists’
creative impulses - View chart >
By asking the artists whether they felt a greater tendency towards the collection
of data or the manipulation and display of it, what began as a workshop for
a straightforward thematic group show (art projects made from ‘day-to-day’
data) became a lot more complex. Some, like
Abigail Reynolds who has been working in residence at the Oxford English
Dictionary making unusual word maps, or Charlotte
White, who seeks to mix music compositions algorithmically through frequency
(meaning occurrence not pitch) in statistics she has collected (i.e. ‘Every
second 2650 cups of tea are drunk in the UK’) feel that it is only through
their visualisation or encoding of the data into an accessible format that the
information – which might have nothing to do with them personally –
becomes interesting, both to them and others. As Lucy
Kimbell – who by contrast has made work from intensely personal data,
producing an index (like a stock market index) of herself as a person, generated
from forms circulated to friends and acquaintances – commented, ‘coins
on the street are not data; by collecting them we turn them into data’.
The question that emerged from the workshop that even a statistical survey couldn’t
answer was how the artist’s method might affect the relevance of the quotidian
data collected (or, more interestingly, vice versa). What is done once data
is turned into knowledge, and to whom is that knowledge useful? Find a penny
pick it up and all day you’ll have good luck. While all of these artists
probably pick the penny up, not all of them think about how it is spent, or
whose pocket it dropped out of. Helen
Frosi’s aesthetic and archival annotation of the coins she picks up
(or the myriad of other items she collects from letter franks to marks on the
wall – finding, tracing, bagging, tagging and mapping them as she goes)
is not distributed other than through the frame of the art gallery, it remains
intensely personal. Homeless people might well like to know which neighbourhoods
in London have the most ‘lucky pennies’ Adele
Prince’s, current project Lucky World instead uses the internet
to chronicle not only the trajectory of the pennies from her to friends around
the world but also the luck they bring her (though she now hopes to chart the
lives of abandoned shopping trolleys – also a useful fixture in the life
of a homeless person, though I fear supermarkets may be more interested in her
tagging of trolleys than Big Issue sellers will be). In other instances, such
as the lists and rules generated by
Hannah Brown (she often consults with couples and subsequently creates a
book of love rules for them; she’s also been matching lonely hearts by
cross referencing the singles ads in various newspapers), the routine data investigated
(did I snog someone I shouldn’t have when I got drunk last night?) reflects
back onto the methodology of collecting it. To engage with the question of use-value
would be to enter into an extensive debate with the artists of the social (personal
and political) impact of their research and collecting, to ask them how what
they do is any different that what train-spotters do. And that, I fear, would
be to partially miss the point of their work, and of this show.
While every artist is concerned with the everyday (not the mundane but the readily
available), not all are obsessively personal about it. However, the number of
artists whose own biographies are explicitly present in their art does outweigh
those whose daily lives don’t figure. Tony
Kemplen tracks international news events in bites of pizza, graphing in
pie chart style his habit of eating supper in front of the television. Ellie
Harrison (also the exhibition’s curator) is similarly interested in
quantifying the seemingly unquantifiable – rating events in her daily
routine, displaying the results in an out of context manner in order to change
their meaning and subsequently making other people aware of their own routine
behaviour.
The artist’s role in society has always been questioned – is it
useful, as is the case with the craft person or the cultural critic, or is it
an ‘excess’, an indulgence, a leisure activity for nought but our
aesthetic gratification? Richard
Dedomenici playfully maps what he calls the Nail Salon Belt around
London, charting social class and upward mobility within the M25 circular. Would
sociologists, urban planners and realtors benefit from Richard’s plotting?
Would they generate simulations and predictions from it? This may indeed be
true of Christian Nold’s
Bio Mapping project. By pairing a GPS device with a biometric reading
apparatus (finger sensors that track your heart rate like those you might wear
in a hospital for instance), Christian can ascertain if crossing the road at
one intersection is more stressful for a pedestrian than crossing at a different
intersection a block further down the street.
The even spread across the axes of the use-value of the data, the open or closed
approach to the presentation of the data, and the subjective or distanced engagement
with the content of the data itself is what promises to be the most interesting
angles and points of tension in this exhibition. While data is the medium in
which all of the artists work, the methods they employ vastly change the meaning
of the data they have gathered, and hence allow room for a reflection on how
it is we experience information itself.