World Memory: The Art of Data Visualization

Exhibition: Saturday March 30th to Sunday May 5th
Opening: Friday March 29

Boston Cyberarts Gallery is proud to present World Memory: The Art of Data Visualization curated by W. Benjamin Bray and George Fifield. As Big Data continues to grow and as artists continue to mine it for both art and artistic information, World Memory presents five artists and two artists teams that have been using data visualization to examine the planet’s natural and artificial structures (both physical and economic.)

About the Artists

dust.zone by Dietmar Offenhuber is an autographic visualization of dust and particulate matter. Using the technique of reverse graffiti, patterns were washed into the surfaces of the city to make the material dimension of air pollution visible. As dust keeps accumulating, the patterns fade and disappear, one circle at the time.

Data Realization: Target Practice by Caitlin & Misha implicates large wealth inequalities in fomenting violent revolutions. They organized residents of A-Z West in Joshua Tree to enjoy the facts together. When it comes to violent response, the bullseye is rarely hit. The shot-through target visualizes the collateral damage inadvertently caused by upheavals.

Catherine D’Ignazio’s 12 Inches of Weather is a series of drawings that map 12 inches of weather on the human body by tracing perspiration, movement and time.

Skye Moret  presents her video Disillusioning Verdure, which challenges our assumptions of the post-colonial Amazon jungle as pristine nature. By emphasizing the nuanced hues of the Brazilian Amazon and city of Manaus, the piece encourages viewers to understand environmental violence through a chromatic lens.

W. Benjamin Bray’s PMOC incorporates molten glass and ocean temperature data in a flowing sculpture that illuminates the Earth’s primary reservoir of energy and gases. The oceans are deep relative to our knowledge of them, but shallow relative to our influence.

Steal Fire by Isabel Beavers uses digital animation and found video footage to visualize recent forest fires in the western United States. The story of Prometheus and the myth of the Theft of Fire provide a narrative context for understanding the simultaneous seduction of fire and also its capacity for destruction. It considers the relationships between satellite imagery, drone technology, and data visualization, as well as the circulation and resolution of images, ultimately interrogating the role of media and technology in desensitizing us to stories of disaster.

A Machine View of Berlin by Certain Measures presents a new map of urban space organized not by geography but purely by the formal similarity of its constituent buildings, as seen through a 40-dimensional computer vision process.

PRESS

Thrills and possibilities as artist ventures into digital realms, by Cate McQuaid, Boston Globe, January 16, 2019