Data Fluencies: Rivuletes

Exhibition Dates: April 18 - June 15 2025
Gallery Hours: Fridays, 4pm–9pm; Saturdays and Sundays, 12pm–6pm
Opening Reception: Friday, April 18, 6pm-8pm
Closing Reception: Saturday, June 14, 6pm-8pm (performance by Lani Asunción from 7pm-8pm)

The first of three thematically-connected shows on view across North America in mid-2025, this exhibition investigates art's potential for reimagining our often narrow understandings of data and machine learning. Using the rivulet (a small, localized stream that flows into larger systems) as a conceptual starting point, the projects in this show work together to explore the ways that adjusting or reconfiguring our individual experiences of data-driven and machine learning systems might lead to broader systemic change. Through critique and subversion of existing technological systems, along with reflection on their prevalence in our lives, the works seen here offer ways to reimagine the data that surrounds us, and to ask what might be possible instead.

Data Fluencies: Rivulets features the work of six contemporary artists, alongside experimental research supported by the Mellon Foundation-funded Data Fluencies Project (based out of the Digital Democracies Institute at Simon Fraser University). The exhibition aims to provide open public engagement with the research outputs emerging from the larger project and place them next to cutting-edge and critical work of artists examining the same themes and ideas. Together, the artists and researchers featured here offer us ways to (re)consider our relationships with the data that drives our everyday lives—and perhaps find new routes to agency once we are able to do so.

Curator:
Roopa Vasudevan

Featured Artists: 
Lai Yi Ohlsen, Lani Asunción, Jazsalyn, Kristoffer Ørum, Caroline Sinders, and Roopa Vasudevan, alongside work from the Data Fluencies Theatre Project (Emerson College, Boston) and DATA/FFECT (York University, Toronto)