Day-to-Day Data
James Coupe, Hedley Roberts & Rob Saunders
Title: 9PIN++
Location: Installation at Aspex Gallery

James, Hedley and Rob have developed a prototype for a data collecting system, based across several of the SCAN locations including: Aspex Gallery, Artsway and the Lighthouse, Poole. The system uses a network which has servers based at each location. Connected to each server, various sensors monitor day-to-day activity in each organisation, such as: when an email is sent or received, when the kettle is boiled or a light switch is turned on or off. At Aspex Gallery, they presented their research into the development of this system through a large scale diagrammatical print.
detail from 9PIN++ Aspex Gallery system plan
detail from 9PIN++ Aspex Gallery system plan
9PIN++ is a project that has been very literally ‘installed’ over the course of 18 months of negotiation with curators, organisations, and committees. It was initially commissioned to map the nine galleries that made up the membership of SCAN.[1] The process involved embedding the project into the institutional fabric of several galleries, including Aspex, by monitoring their activities using a complex system of sensors, actuators and feedback loops. In a way, this is quite similar to the idea of a site-specific artwork, where neither site nor artwork can change independently of the other. With 9PIN++ however, the site was not just a specific gallery but also the network of people, spaces, events and meetings that constituted SCAN. Our aim with this strategy was to have the project’s representation determined by its site as much as possible. It looks and behaves the way that it does because that is what and where it has ended up once the component parts of SCAN have been institutionally, politically, technologically, socially and organisationally mapped in relation to the project’s aims and goals.

This project was really less about our direct acquisition of data and more about the establishment of a system that would be able to collect data and then autonomously make sense of it. In considering how this would be most effective, we needed to develop an understanding of what would be appropriate for SCAN without ourselves being too deterministic. We wanted the system to discover SCAN itself rather than have us just tell it. A great deal of the process was therefore concerned with making the project as invisible as possible – installing a monitoring system that could co-exist with the normal day-to-day running of the galleries, composing a computer architecture that could evenly distribute the algorithms that we deployed, and responding to the inevitable question of ‘what it looked like’. Ultimately, this project is not about visualising data, it is about parasitically installing a system that can use data to understand its host, and communicate that understanding via its actions. The question then becomes ‘how has the project changed SCAN?’ If it has, then the symbiotic relationship referred to above has been successfully established.

James Coupe, Hedley Roberts & Rob Saunders
May 2005


1. SCAN (Southern Collaborative Arts Network). A consortium of arts venues / organisations in southern England www.scansite.org



www.9pinxx.net



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