Between Craft and Code: Making Sense of Data Materialization

This exhibition, being held at the University of Portsmouth, seeks to explore the human experience in a world of data. Building on the field of data visualisation and embodiment, we are moving into multi-sensory and physical ways of making sense of digital information.

All 3 creative contributors to this exhibition were working with the same live industrial data sample provided by the Centre of Intelligent Data Solutions (CIDS). The data was then interpreted, processed and manifested using the same set of rules, seeking to explore the algorithm as a metaphor.

Dr. Simone Gumtau, who conceived the overall exhibition concept, is designing a screen based data visualisation, which will in future feed into a functioning interface implemented on marine vessels. This is part of a project led by Professor David Brown and Dr. Edward Smart using sensor data to predict catastrophic engine failures.

The same data and process is then interpreted and applied by London based textile artist Cassi Hill, responding to a set of instructions that maps the data into a 3D textile sculpture; and in the same way, experimental sound and interactive artist Simon Kunath is creating a vibrotactile display that allows the visitor to literally sense the data.

The results may produce patterns that are perceivable across the different media, although it may not. It is expected that the results will have considerable variation, highlighting the individual human experience in producing and consuming these works. The work also allows us to question the tensions between commonly held perceptions around craft-making as a generative, complex, messy, intuitive process, and commonly held perceptions around code making (programming) as a predictable, linear, constrained and logical process.