 Dwi'n ddweud i'r arddangos eich tym ni'n gwybod i'r llungell. Rydyn ni'n gwybod i'r llungell yn ddechrau'n gwybod i'r cyfle i'r fathio. Rydyn ni'n gwybod i'r fathio'r cyfnodol yn ystod o'r llungell ar y cyfnodol a'r teimlo. Mae'r Ffyrdd Arddangos oedd yn ymdweud i'r llungell. Rydyn ni'n gweithio'r ffyrdd ac i'r ddechrau, yn ymdweud i'r celf a'r dweud i'r cyfrwng. Fy hoeddiwch i'r gwybod. I'm a contemporary art curator and I specialise particularly in the increasingly irrelevant term of media art which is art or artists working with technology particularly emergent technologies digital and electronic. I say increasingly irrelevant because I think that everybody is doing that now in one way or another but it's still a slightly different term. Data as culture is now in its third year and it's our contemporary art programme here at the Open Data Institute. It's unusually led by an artist Julie Freeman who's here eating her sausage sandwich and of course Gavin Starks our CEO is also highly directed direction and I've been here since last June when I was hugely privileged to be invited by Julie and Gavin as an associate curator in residence to work with the team. So the bulk of my practice in 20 years has actually been at the science museum in London where I was the head of arts programme and I established and led really over a period of about 17 years and I commissioned artists working in all different sorts of media, worked traditional sculpture, painted lots and lots of media art and technology art, rubbish we worked with imagine but my entry point there really was through working with technology and the science museum built the welcome wing which you can see here with the oops with the copyright oh no the peculiar I've actually pasted a password for something I'm doing on that inadvertently so I've no idea how that happened multitasking um but this is what the welcome wing looked like in 2000 when the new building had just been built and at the time it was built as a contemporary theatre of contemporary science that heralded a new era of science communication for the science museum that was very very discursive and brought in a lot of different subjective views as well as the authoritative or neutral voice of the science museum and experts. Art was a really good art and this gallery here was called Who Am I and that's still there that's about biomedical science. This gallery at the top was called Digitopolis and that's there and Digitopolis was a project that looked at digital technology through some of the commissions, the art commissions that we did for that project and give you a bit of how I ended up here so I did a fine art course and I actually studied as a painter originally um and it was very very traditional so Frank Albaugh taught David Bromberg who taught me and I didn't quite reach their heights um to wait smack in the middle of the 1990s recession. I only found myself asking a lot of questions about the purpose of art in culture and society and of course a really key question there for me at that time to continue as a practicing artist or not which I actually quite quickly concluded I didn't want to but one of the things that informed that was the art world at the time was very very productive, very energetic, the young British art in their 50s were all over the place it was a very exciting time and there was also an aura that felt to be overly self-referential purpose and waiting for my life. I might see it differently if I were to go back in time and start again but that's how you know in my early 20s so I began to look around the corners and outside of the mainstream about what would give me more of a sense of purpose and meaning to be honest and I found a publication in the arts council published called Very Spaghetti published in 1992 and it looked at an exciting new advent of digital media it was called interactive media then wasn't it interactive media multimedia multimedia and muses for interpreting um it really caught my mind the thought that you could bring to multiple channels and I got together with a group of friends who were in the mainstream and actually um and also the highly influential British software and Jones Morris and um we set up a digital media company for clients across the board it was a um an active commercial company um things that we really felt was quite is to uh oh they forgot to go on to that slide that was sensation and that was some really interesting media art Paul Sermon telematic vision and in the early 1990s artists beginning to think about where we locate ourselves and how to um sort of changing our sense of place in the world um and back to Studio Fish we didn't write Pong but we did decide that um what we needed to do was to all learn C++ and learn to code and it was very apparent very quickly because none of my balls ever came back that he was the star student absolutely computers on our lives and of course this is 1993 a long time for everyone was carrying a supercomputer in the back of their pockets and it felt like something pretty big and I definitely wanted to continue um to somehow bring media art ideas to a broader audience wrote the term media art ideas because um I've already alluded to the discomfort I share with that term but I think what I mean by that is really the idea of a commitment to acknowledging technology and industry creating spaces in order to avoid those spaces becoming entirely corporate or government led it's really essential but and artists and ordinary citizens populate and shape those spaces as well and that's how I felt in the early 1990s looking at the advent of what we call multimedia but I also feel that very much here coming into the open day essentially is looking at underlying structures that are changing the form of the web as we know it today and and moving into a really exciting new thing more likely that anyone can be an artist universally accessible tool the common pencil is the most accessible thing out there and anyone can draw and I do believe anyone can draw but I was democratization and high and low cultures that have been brought about by the ability for each one of us to publish and broadcast what we like which has been brought about by digital technologies and that has been a really really important development and influenced through an idea and maybe we might come back to that in the discussion after I finish 25 minutes but I'm just going to walk you through some of the projects I've done with artists during my time at the science museum and then what we're doing here in data as culture so this is a piece by David Rochby who's a Canadian artist who writes all his own software and it's called watched and measured and it was in the welcome wing the early digital welcome wing and the purpose of digitopolis was to explain digitopolis through a permanent museum gallery which I think we can all slightly laugh at now and say yes it's quite flawed concept because of course within a couple of years of that gallery the the parameters of the ways in which people experience digital technology were completely different from the descriptions of digital technology that it described but the kind of common themes that the gallery was spit up to I think still stand up today and that computer vision networks futures and privacy and surveillance museum brought me in at the time as a curator to show digital about standing application to David Rochby and several others and this piece are after she's a privacy and surveillance artists who were developing soft and writing all their own software from scratch we're really working with software engines that have taken years using years of research so very commonly those artists were making multiple works from one particular engine it had a piece called watch um which um where he would on a street scene and the camera would capture there'd be several different algorithms that it would flick between and some would be moving objects and some would be completely still objects and it took on a very very political um role in the street because of course homeless people who were sitting and begging would be um completely absent from the moving scenes and would be the only thing present in the still scenes for example and there were many other examples and we of course were bringing this into a museum and but um he we the structure that it's on is a sort of big metal glass and metal structure that was already a fixed construction design so we've got one screen of images of people moving through the museum and every now and then he wrote a digital zoom that zoomed in on and their faces as you could see actually nearly every face in that shot I think is David when he was testing it um and he also applied a word and it might say anxious happy excited relevant when you think about how long ago this is you know 15 years ago starting David really wanted to provoke um thoughts about the subjectivity of network systems and this was at a time when there was a lot of conversation about the validity of the photographic in the cctv image in law so really prescient really interesting project you know 15 years ago by the way um the science museum team in their research this gallery hadn't seen any other example that was as good at a digital it had written himself which again was a big shout for artists and artist-led research so Jonathan Jones Morrison made a piece called machination which was a development of an existing work as well and what happened is um a neural network um uh compare visitors that it captured at site um and mapped a series of a database of household objects that the patterns of visitors faces and resubmitted you what it thought you most resembled um i was most often a um scotty dog which was quite upset kind of um ceramic object it really raised a lot of questions about how machines see things differently than we do and asked questions about whether they think differently of course as well it reinforced the fact that representation is a matter of opinion and um and that humans and machines represent things differently jumping into 2000 in 2004 i was the senior curator for a gallery fueling the future which is a hands-on interactive gallery for children age seven to fourteen with their families and teachers and it looks at the future of how energy might power our lives and what the challenges are so it's a formal learning environment um but it was really important within that formal learning environment to bring our into the mix to allow um people to sort of see things from many different perspectives that was quite a defining feature of museum environments in in the sort of 15 years of bringing together lots of different disparate elements um and what we wanted given that we decided to make it a hands-on gallery we did want to see if the art could bring a sense of physicality so i approached the artist christian muller who's a german media artist and said can you think of a physical encounter with energy and of course he took me at his work and came up with do not touch which is a slaughter ceiling capacitive pole that if you touch it gives you an electric shock now you don't necessarily have to do that when you enter that zone which is part of the art you get a very strong warning sound um but if you do touch it you will get an electric shock so there's a big question there of whether the shock is punishment or reward and he's really you know playing subversively with museum instructional language to provoke apparent misbehaviour very complex near a fail safe way of making that um safe in a museum environment but it was and visitors love it um so the last work i'll talk about from the science museum is a quite nice segue between there and here in its listening post by mark hanson and ben rubin mark hanson is a and ben rubin is a sound eye and they met um towards the end of the 1990s at a bell labs and a the idea of the workshops was to just see what happened together and they were listed in the text when suddenly masses and masses and masses of people were taking advantage of the ability to enter into communication with one another over the network um and they started to analyse the data um and what they came up with was noticing the patterns of the women's communicate online so some of the first tasks they set themselves was um would would they know actually the first question they asked themselves is what would the sound of the internet be like and i think they had some thoughts about whether they were going to sonify the internet and they decided they didn't want to sort of make it that simple or that straightforward they wanted to sort of see what was being said and when they analyse the patterns of how people talk to each other the most common starter of every single they looked at an internet relay um chat rooms and all sorts of differences um was i am so they began to capture fragments of i am sequences and they built this structure that's 251 of action fluorescent screens sort of a sort of theatrical curtain sort of installation slaughter ceiling they play out different movements that are created statistical sort of analyses of least used words most used words i am things that start with i love and every time i'm sorry i haven't got a a move of it but you can find that on the internet um every time it sort of enters a new movement the size of the words changes the motion of the words changes and while the words are being played on the screen sometimes one word across sometimes 10 words in each screen out accompanied by a lovely soundtrack the footsteps and it is very very powerful um and what it is recognised as being is an outstanding engineering of real-time data visualisation and data mining technology it's really you know their exploration of what's how the content and magnitude of the internet is really written it is kind of really you know potentially dying there are huge questions that this work raises it becomes a very very important point in history and nor are the artists unaware of the political ramification one of the things my that is the you know the advent of these histories of digital information presents us with an interesting challenge how can we represent and interpret such complex abstract and socially important data and both he and mark are ben really recognise that now the simple acting data has serious situations alluded to in this work opportunity of having that work at the science museum which was on display for about seven years and it's not at the moment but back um a group of young people to work with us to create their own and so i had um i think it was about young young muslin british women between the ages of 13 and 19 came and had spent a day each with different media artists and um they worked with artists who were photographers uh scroll robots with Jonah Brooker Cohen they did video sniffing and they did a whole series of things that explored the impact of technology on their lives and they had an exhibition alongside listening post which was again a really important thing is that members of a community who might feel disengaged from technology or from art um get to make and do stuff and get involved and i think that's something that is getting people to have that kind of impressed so i've touched on actually some of the issues the data is culture program politics and politics of data and cultures of sharing exchange and one of the things that we always like to tell because it is such an extraordinary story is that data is culture was initiated by um Gavin and Julie within days of the ODI actually being operational um and people here are very clear that although this is a technology company it's very much about behavior change as much as it is about any technologies which might be affecting that change i think that everyone working here um at the ODI recognized a big challenge to and shared language actually about what we're doing and um i think we will recognize that art can provide numerous and exciting ways of engaging with that and critically responding to that so i don't think anybody here um and i certainly wouldn't want to work if they did thinks that art illustrates sort of is a marketing tool something that is a fundamental tool that's all about supporting the ambitions of the open data institute from a cultural perspective it's been going for three years as i mentioned um in the first two years it showed works that kind of reflect a different data sources that might challenge understanding of how what data and how it might affect and reflect our lives and last year um the program looked at questions of ownership and authority over personal and public data the third season we're doing a couple of different things we're developing a series of projects under the umbrella theme data anthropologies where we're looking at the human at the center of all of the data and that's going to include talks performances partnerships and exhibitions there's an exhibition here at the moment there's a piece of work over there and if you wander around afterwards you can look at Thompson and Craighead's work here and we're also developing a major show for 2017 um but a big thing we're doing immediately now is focusing on practice so we've opened the open data rep itself to a couple of artists in residence um and i'll tell you about their projects in a second but i at the same time want to tell you about one of the first projects i worked on here which is Julie Freeman's We Need Us it's weneedus.org it is a web-based artwork that we co-commissioned with the space and it's a piece that draws five animated artwork powered by people using the web and it is actually an open data artwork hello there are some seats if you want to come and sit down give me a tea break so this piece draws on metadata by capturing collecting and exposing real-time activities of the citizen science project's universe users as they click and swipe around the globe it's a thought experiment actually which is one of the things i really love about it where Julie's really exploring what the living qualities of data might be the fundamental qualities of data i think we look to data to provide us with information but i think Julie's argument when we discussed it was very much there's other things happening here that aren't so obvious and aren't so um apparent and we really should be exploring those as well and i find that really intriguing and exciting thought and i kind of feel like this piece asks you know if data had lives of their own what would they be and we don't know that they don't but we also don't know what they would be search led we don't know whether Julie's process is going to result in a definitive answer and i don't think that matters a jot i think it's asking the questions that makes it so exciting and it explores data in terms of what is unpredictable and what's unknowable and these are qualities in life that i think are really important that artists are very often concerned with that um corporates are very often not concerned it's really important and a title was something that very deliberately we need us reminds us of the humanity and technology that we need us as much as we need it that's that and Julie's here if anyone wants to talk about that in a few moments um so this is Thompson and Craighead and they are the current artists in residence and their work is on all around the OGI office at the moment some of their existing work and um this particular piece is called decorative news feeds and um i'll tell you a bit about them before I explain this um what their work what we like about their work is that they really question what it means to aggregate and interconnect large bodies of information um and they very often draw on the huge databases and repositories of human broadcast on the internet such as facebook twitter uh like uh google and they invite reflection on how mechanisms like the worldwide web alter extend and distort our understanding of the world around us news feeds news headlines from around the world and transforms them into algorithmically drawn animated lines that create sort of beautiful across the screen it when you go out you'll see it it's just behind the reception desk and as different headlines travel around the world their original meanings and implications are sort of transformed they cross over each other and you start to draw unusual links which it raises questions you know about the mutability of data and information and how the way we experience it informs its meaning as much as the actual content and I always enjoy seeing that here and walking into our kitchen where we've got the news on the BBC news and you've got the same information and it's such a reminder that you know a lot of journalism is such a construct as well you know that we're constantly constructing our reality and this really reminds us of that um so what you know John and Ali are really keen observers of the ways in which people interact with these new spaces um as I've said they draw on youtube footage search terms and all sorts of different extracted texts from individuals and corporates around online media um and we were really interested in um what what people like John and Ali who've been working together for over 20 years since before the first and observing how we've all behaved online up until now even though they're not open data artists specifically and none of their existing work is specifically open data although a lot of it is shared data we're really keen to see what such critical minds will come up with in creating a new commission during their residency with us so that will be quite exciting in July we'll have another artist in residence called Natasha Karawana she's an award winning up and coming photographic artist um she uses quite sort of bold and inventive performative strategies often in her work and she's got great interpersonal skills these aren't all her by the way um and she also is very interested in scientific processes and forms of data capture which she started speaking with us she didn't call that data capture but then she realised that she was working with data already and she was really intrigued at the prospect of coming to work with us nearly all of her works concerned with narratives of love betrayal and fantasy but she nearly always draws from online archives and the internet and personal narratives which questions you know the way that technology um impacts today's relationships and these images are from um a series called fairy tale for sale but she became intrigued these are all authentic she's in there are lots of them and she realised that people selling on their wedding gowns come over themselves actually um and so that that's become a project and that sort of gives you an idea of her sort of serious fun that she applies um and what she said in relation to her residency here is my art practice to date has always dabbled with data looking at statistics of love and infidelity working at the OGI will push mewdo analysis head first into the world of no head first into the world of data to see what appears from playing with enormous possibilities of everyday statistics so again we don't know exactly what Natasha's going to create or exactly what Thompson and Craig had are going to create but it's really exciting to to be part of that process and again those works will underlie our 2017 major exhibition will also oh don't want to go there yet um which will also um involve a lot of participation and again I think all of us are quite interested in bringing um projects with communities into the work we do um so I guess I'll conclude a bit by sharing what got me really excited about being able to work on this programme which is the position I think ODI holds in relation to the fundamental shifts in what we might call last century thinking I have to admit I've stolen that term from the artist Stephen Willis who uses it frequently in his frustration with people's inability to look forward particularly in relation to technologies and systems and I think that's happening a lot to do with the developments in the network um and I just want to show you this slide that I found on a a non data artist website I take the theft of my original work very seriously and would draw to your attention if it's protected under UK copyright law please note I will always sue for compensation if any part of my website design sculptures photos or SEO at the text or images are found being used without prior authorisation and writing this includes derivative works the law is quite making of what is called derivative work that means work based or derived from another copyrighted work is the exclusive province of the owner of the original work now clearly this person's had some bad experience um and I don't want to denigrate this person um and I think that artists have absolutely the moral rights to be the authors of their work and to earn a living from that and to be you know and to take ownership of that um but I couldn't help being this came across quite heavy handed particularly as it happens this is let's admit that matter a bit shared boxes like science art technology let's think about systems and things that are holistic and things that cross different boundaries and pick up different influences as they go along broadcast obviously people in charge telling people what to think and do now let's all transmit and we're all saying what we think and it's all coming out and so obviously the one too many moves to the many too many the elite moves to the democratic and the defined to the hybrid that's what I'd like anyway thank you will do now is take some questions for Hannah or for Julie as well if you have any for both of them and just a reminder i'm going to throw around the catch box which catches all the audio if you could also just introduce yourself when you're asking the question that would be great so does anyone have any burning questions for Hannah hello well just a reminder and have a look around afterwards all of the artworks that Hannah was mentioning or sorry some of the artworks that Hannah mentioned in her presentation have dotted around the office there's one here on this wall and there's a few others dotted around at reception and around the office so feel free to have a browse afterwards we do yeah it's a treat to be able to live with it here can i throw the catch box at you yeah i know or maybe actually if i i know how is this recording me i'm here um hi Hannah thanks um i'm actually from the space that commissioned the help commission the um we need us piece um i've heard a few people working in data art kind of talk about a kind of um the uh data as a kind of medium um do you think that's a kind of useful metaphor for it like oil or clay or paint or actually think it is um because i think that it's acknowledging that this is something that is in our that wasn't and i think it's useful in that respect but i think it will become less and less useful as that becomes a given um i don't think that it become it's particularly surprising but i think that it's interesting to acknowledge data as stuff that is all around us because otherwise it's this sort of invisible it's that it's that thing about where's the real world is the real world on screen or is it just the physical world most of us live our lives in the screen and that's real you know i don't know if julie would like to add to that to this secretly i like the uh the idea of data as a material to view it as an art material and then because by just by framing it in that way you treat it in a different way i mean data can be used to convey information in a very straightforward um kind of a data data views or an infographic or through statistical traditional statistical methods but if you want to in different ways you know conceptually thinking of it as a material allows you to bend it and stretch it and be a bit freer with it like unrelease it from its contextual shackles and do something else with it yeah yeah yeah and some events going on around the third data and culture program um you you're welcome to stay and have a look at the artworks as i mentioned but we'll also have the artist um thompson and craighead um in an open house um what anyone on the on the 20th of may and i'll be giving some of the artworks that are around the office maybe oh no i want it on as well sorry no and so this sort of julie's followed some of i don't know if you want to say but you've followed the um projects of zooniverse and created different oh what have i done yeah that's what i was trying to do and so each of these formulations represents a different series of activities so this is users now interacting with zooniverse but it's not metadata that's collectible it's not metadata that we're going to use and sell to a corporate it's simply shaping these handcrafted algorithms that julie's written and giving you a different way of seeing them sometimes when i'm um i'm looking at this and then i turn on to something else i forget it's on my headset and then i put my headset back on because i use voice recognition software and i get whoa this sort of sounds and actually i love it when that happens because we have a really big discussion julie and i about whether this work should be um shown in a gallery or live online and julie felt really strongly that you should encounter public art online in the same way that you encounter public art in the public or in the physical public realm and so when i forget that i've got it there and then i sort of stumble on it it's always that really exciting moment but we are going to plan a series of performances for it because the sound is really powerful and and obviously we can do much more exciting things with sound and and vision if we do sort of performances at different galleries and events i don't know if you want to add anything julie there we go i'll let everyone go now i just wanted to do that oh question that's it go on Chris um Chris given one sqw i was just going to ask you're talking about data all the time do you think open data itself has any kind of possibilities in itself at a worth that don't apply to data more generally is there possibilities of collaboration or whatever with open data specifically rather than as i say more general data standing mean i'm quite new here and i'm not an open data specialist but i think the idea that apropo the thing i showed you from an artist as you're saying don't use my stuff never reference me that's that means that certain conversations are closed down but if you're using open data that's available for reuse you're applying thousands of different minds to the same information that can come up with different things and i mean it's clear what the open data opportunities are in industry um and you know in in commercial applications um and in for the public good in terms of the health service and and travel and all sorts of other things in terms of the art world it's going to require different ways of thinking but i think it really does challenge the notion of the single genius which when you look into it is quite rare actually most really incredible art is made by quite big teams of people in one way or another with again without detracting from the skill of individual artists and the respect that you know i share for them do you see what i mean i think i think there are a huge opportunities and i think it just we don't know what they are because we have to try we have to have a go thanks so much hannah thank you oh and just to let everyone know we'll be taking a break next week we won't have a lecture next Friday but back again the week after thanks everyone