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'Tangible' Data Helps This Art Exhibit Track Visitors' Attention Spans

The Big Bang Data exhibit 'Data Falls' takes visitor data and transforms it into time with sand clocks.
Image: Domestic Data Streamers

The Barcelona-based group Domestic Data Streamers works in a field they call "New Data Languages." Believing the future of understanding data will be found in taking people away from the screen, the group wants to make data tangible. If they have their way, people, or users, will leave infographics behind and begin visualizing information as "info-experiences."

Domestic Data Streamers' new work, Data Falls, now on at Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona's Big Bang Data, is the group's latest effort in new data languages. The installation allows visitors to view five pieces of art, while data indicating time spent looking at each work is visualized with a dedicated sand clock.

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"The objective is to generate new methods of visualizing data which can be taken far away into a different field of work, analogical even, generating physical interactions with people and the space in which they are found," said Domestic Data Streamer's Pau Garcia. "In effect, trying to treat information so that it becomes an experience."

Data Falls installation at Big Bang Data exhibit in Barcelona, Space. Image: Domestic Data Streamers

For Data Falls, the group divided a room into five different spaces, each featuring a different work. Like any exhibition, visitors moved from one to the other, taking the experience in at their own pace. Some rushed through, others didn't. Where the exhibition terminates, Domestic Data Streamers placed five sand clocks. These clocks released a bit of sand for every second the visitor spent in front of a piece.

The idea for Data Falls came from the context of the Big Bang Data exhibition. It started with a question: "How can we extract quantitative data on the impact of a work of art?"

"We always try to make sense between the data we are collecting and the space in which is the project done—in this case an exhibition full of artworks," said Garcia. "The second step, after understanding the context, was to ask questions, and this question about extracting data on art's impact was the one that most interested us."

Instead of making a minor impact on the installation, data powers it. As with all Domestic Data Streamers projects, the individual visitor runs the system with their data.

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Data falls - Domestic Data Streamers from Les Palmiers on Vimeo.

"We feel that today an informative monologue between a person and data isn’t enough," Garcia said. "The intention is to construct new languages, allowing an open dialogue between the two."

"We had the idea that we wanted to work with an analogy as simple as time and sand reflecting the same, in order to transform data into a physical element," he added. "From here on we began to conceive and design the whole piece, involving traditional processes with advanced production techniques."

They didn't want the digital aspect of Data Falls getting too much attention, so they decided to involve "noble materials." This ambition led them to recruit two craftsmen, a glazier and blacksmith, to build each artwork's corresponding sand clock modules.

Close-up of the Data Falls sand clock modules: Image: Domestic Data Streamers

"It was quite a task having to explain to them all the processes involved from creating the skeleton and making the sensors work to using processing and the Arduino to help make the sand fall," Garcia said. "For this reason, the important thing is just the falling of the sand and watching it pile up into a mountain."

To capture the data, Big Bang Data curators Olga Subiros and Jose Luis de Vicente suggested that Domestic Data Streamers team with Counterest, a tech company that deals in analytics.

"Counterest were already interested in working with this explorative way to analyze visitor flow through the exhibition," Garcia said. "So, we were then able to make the perfect connection between data capture and data visualization."

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The team of collaborators decided to use Microsoft Kinect sensors in combination with Counterest software to gather visitor data. Each sensor, as Garcia noted, is able to capture the mount of time every visitor spends in front of an artwork. It can also sense exactly how look they look directly at it, and also gauge the sex of each visitor.

Image: Domestic Data Streamers

Domestic Data Streamers didn't stop there. The sensors and software gather and analyze data over the course of a month to see just how visitors interact with each piece, and the exhibition as a whole.

"This installation is the first one that we decided to use to capture the visitors' data without them knowing anything about it, so that for the first time we understood what it means to steal data from somebody," he said. "As all the processes were shown transparently, people didn’t feel it was intrusive but in fact it was; which shows something that is happening today in all places, institutions, streets, and obviously also on the internet."

Garcia said that while this is their first artistic exploration of new data visualization, it won't be the group's last.

"We live in an information era, and we need new tools to openly understand what data means," he said. "The moment we truly understand data, we will then be able to start thinking about how we can change the patterns found within it."