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Digital Anthropologists Explore What It Means to Be a Human in a Dataverse

The point when the dataverse replaces the universe.
Image: DaC3

Hannah Redler wants to examine how humans own and control their information within a dataverse. "We wanted to look at the human at the centre of all the technology and data," she told me. "It isn't just about being tech-savvy, but about how technology affects us in our everyday lives."

Redler is the curator in residence for the Data as Culture 3 exhibit, currently on show at the UK's Open Data Institute, which promotes public engagement with open data. For this year's exhibit, titled "Data Anthropologies," current artists in residence Alison Craighead and Jon Thomson are showing documentary-led artworks that focus on how humans are dealing with an increasingly data-dense digital environment.

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The duo's past and most recent works, based on freely available data, are dotted around ODI's office space. Inside the reception area, you'll glimpse "Six Years of Monday," featuring an alternative, split-screen view onto a series of time-lapse recordings of the weather. The images come from a collection of footage painstakingly taken by a Scottish man from his window every Monday from 6 AM to 6 PM since 2006 in the Scottish Kingdom of Fife.

Section of "Six Years from Monday." Image courtesy DaC3.

Venture further into the office, and you'll see an older piece from 2004 called "Decorative Newsfeed" that shows a series of live news headlines rotating like digital snakes around a screen. "Corruption" features a frame from a corrupt video file on a photographic lightbox, and "Voyager" offers a curiously analogue take on the first man-made probe to venture into our solar system. The piece is a woodblock print displaying a selection of then UN secretary general's greeting messages to the roaming probe.

Craighead and Thomson come from a fine art and film and video-making background. They initially started out making art in physical studio spaces, but quickly made the online sphere their digital sandbox. They told me that they don't see themselves as data artists per se, but are interested in exploring how the physical world relates to the virtual one, and understanding humanity's place in an increasingly data-dense world.

Patrons interacting with "Decorative Newsfeed." Image courtesy DaC3.

"People have called us 'armchair anthropologists.' It's because we like going on the web and exploring how people do things online," Craighead told me. "But we don't distinguish ourselves from everyone else,"added Thomson, "we're like the 'participant-observer' in anthropology, the person who observes while being a member of a community."

Thomson and Craighead are set to exhibit their final works in 2017, and are currently making some prototype artworks from datasets they've come across at ODI. Next up, they'll be making art works based on marine traffic data and tackling the subject of nuclear waste.

We're constantly feeding data into the cloud and leaving digital footprints as we browse the web. But the language of bits and bytes can sometimes be confusing for average people. Craighead and Thomson, however, want to make data accessible and understandable. "The term Big Data is very general, but we're interested in how data can be given a language so that the public can start to make sense of all the different types of data out there," said Thomson.