Title:
Untitled (Physical
Bar Charts)
Location: Installation at all gallery venues
Lucy’s Physical Bar Charts are a way of gaining information from
the public about what they do in the their spare time. Five large perspex cylinders
will be sited in the gallery. At Angel Row they will be positioned in the window
space, where they can have most interaction with passers-by. Each cylinder acts
as a bar in the chart and is filled with a different coloured badge featuring
a statement about how you may or may not spend your time. As the visitors remove
and keep badges the levels in the cylinders drop, producing an instant reflection
of what are the most and least popular statements.
possible outcomes of the Physical Bar Charts
If
there is a subject matter, it is the process of data production and representation.
My projects make visible the effects that these have on one another by producing
records that are entangled with the things they are recording and their means
of production. They seem to show that relations are not external to us –
something outside of people or things – but enter into us, and we into
them.
In previous projects I have gathered and made
public data about myself.[1] I have instantiated data-gathering
systems that interfere with a university.[2] I have also
designed means that make visible political and citizenship activity.[3]
My project for Day-to-Day Data ties consumption to data production
and representation. What you take is what you see.
Often deploying or undertaking research, my ways of working can resemble management
initiatives or social science, in most cases a flawed or failed version, spawning
bastardised methods and methodologies, tools and techniques. There are barely
research questions let alone answers. In each project I have to work out what
can be asked. I must work out the relationship between myself, the viewer,
and what can be known. I have to work out how to find out what I believe can
be known. For Day-to-Day Data, I am asking questions about research
by prompting people to think about how they idle away their time in public
spaces. The project involves making records that tell us something about relations
between people and people, and people and things, and things and things. Viewers
consume the piece by consuming part of it. The piece says ‘Let us be
part of each other’.
Lucy Kimbell
May 2005
1. Audit, 2002; The LIX Index, 2002 –
2003
2. Making a Difference at the University of Plymouth, 2004
3. Pindices, 2005, a collaboration with sociologist Andrew Barry
Untitled (Physical Bar Charts) is a result of a Creative
and Performing Arts Fellowship, supported by the Arts
and Humanities Research Council, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine
Art.
www.lucykimbell.com
