Whitelaw present us with different artist that employ data
artist in different ways, from the use of data to convey information to the use
of data to produce an artwork without the importance of the information that
the data might contain, which I believe allows us to take data to above and
beyond.
I believe the reason in which sometimes this might seem
problematic is because we believe that data and information are pretty similar
when, as Whitelaw’s argues, they are slightly different. Then the meaning of
data, or the information that we get from the data can be somehow molded by data
artists.
Two interesting examples are Dragulescu’s and Jevbratt’s pieces. They use their data to
convey a different message or meaning from it. Dragulescu’s takes spam from the
forgotten email graveyard and transform it into great structural pieces! Even when the context of spam email is presented different one can also observe the 'violent' presence of spam in the pieces.
On the other hand Jevbratt does not seem the
information in data to be really important and she lets the audience use their
own interpretation to construct a meaning from this data set which relates to
reality.
It is intriguing the ways in which data can be transformed
from a collection to a piece of art that can either give us some meaningful
information about the data used or none at all. At the same time, the uses of data
agency seems to focus more in the data itself rather than information. I think
in this way we are able to explore and focus more on the data to discover various
meanings.
