Archive — Data Body — Interactive installation, 2019

An installation about the data we can’t see

A life-size figure on a gallery wall. Touch its heart or its brain, and you complete the circuit and become part of the data.

Role: Programming, projection mapping, animation
Team: Four students
Where: FINA Gallery, UBC Okanagan
Built with: Max/MSP, Arduino, conductive ink

Overview

Data shapes our lives without our consent. We wanted to make it visible.

Digital data surrounds everything we know, yet we understand almost nothing about it or the impact it has on us. Do we have a right to our personal data? Does it belong to us? These questions inspired an installation that shows something normally invisible, and asks people to consider the scale and presence of data in everyday life.

We knew our space (the back wall of the FINA Gallery), that we’d have a projector, and that we wanted it to be interactive. The hardest part was getting started. Our first ideas forced the theme too hard: we were telling a story without letting viewers put the pieces together. So we stepped back and imagined something more abstract, which put the viewer inside the piece.

What if touching the work made you part of the data?

Inspiration

Raw data as art, and projection that tells a story.

Ryoji Ikeda, datamatics

Ikeda turns raw data into immersive, stark black-and-white projections. It shaped our look: numbers scrolling across a dark wall, so the viewer is lost in a sea of data.

Fred Penelle & Yannick Jacquet, Mécaniques Discursives

Projection-mapped woodcuts that blend recognizable objects with machines. It showed us the power of a recognizable figure, and of telling a story through projection mapping.

Making it

A human silhouette, a heart and a brain, wired with conductive ink.

We centred the piece on the viewer. I bought Bare Conductive ink, the world’s first non-toxic conductive ink, because it worked as a metaphor: when you touch it, you complete an electrical circuit, the way our data is absorbed into the whole system.

We split the work by strengths. I programmed the piece, using Max/MSP for the projection mapping and Arduino to connect the conductive ink, and I made the background animation: black-and-white numbers falling around the figure, the information always around us that we can’t see. My teammates designed the artwork and the animations that play on touch: the tablets, phones and laptops in our everyday lives.

A heart, then a brain

Touching the heart connects a human life to the devices we depend on. Days before installing, we added the brain as a second touch point.

Because…

The brain closed the loop: a human brain beside an artificial one. Does one hold more power than the other? And if so, which one?

Reflection

What I learned

Research is where ideas come from.

I’d never been taught to study other artists’ work for inspiration. The piece wouldn’t have had its impact without it.

Hardware teaches you to debug.

The conductive ink was harder than we expected, which forced us to really learn Arduino. Working through it made me a better problem solver and a better programmer.