“Seeing the Unseeable: Data Design Art” opening (Photo- Garrett Rowlan)
If architecture is frozen music, as had been said, then Seeing the Unseeable: Data Design Art, is a snapshot of the digital age.
By Garrett Rowlan
Presented at the Roulet Williamson Gallery at ArtCenter, the exhibit features data—that hidden river of computation which is our increasing interface with the world. Graphic art, and a variety of mediums capturing of the protean and veiled ubiquity of data are displayed through 4K screens.
The artists in the exhibit seem either to trace the flow of information, or to stop it in midflight and examine it.
Wind Map, by Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenburg, fills a wall with throbbing, fluted lines that curl above the United States. Arcing tendrils depict wind patterns in real time, suggesting the movement of data. With this and other displays, Seeing the Unseeable lets us imagine we are seeing the flow of zeroes and ones across America.
It’s in the nature of this exhibit to invite metaphors, going from the busy outline of the entire USA in Wind Map to the shore of an ocean in Rafael Lozano-Hernandez’s Hormonium, which shows floating, random letters, like the units of language, drifting above the shore of a wine-dark sea. The crashing waves have an eerie similarity to a wipes in a computer screen or delete key on a keyboard, erasing data and replacing it with other data. In a similar fashion, the mountain shown in one of Refik Anadol’s trippy, continually morphing landscapes suggests a cauldron of seething information.
Exhibit at ArtCebter (Photo- Garrett Rowlan)
Perhaps the phenomenon of incoming data is so overwhelming that it leads to the desire to freeze, find a point of view and capture. Seo Hyojung’s Singapore Weather Data shows a personal meteorology of small, rectangular shards bumping into each other. Giorgia Lupi’s and Ehren Shonday’s Incroci bring to mind an evolving form of communication without imagery. George Legardy’s Phantom Waves suggests pre-linguistic processes, the core patterns of language, evoking the recording of a creation event, whether ours or some other civilization.
Two other pieces suggest an incongruity with the rest of the exhibit. Mini Ọnụọha’s filing cabinets (with their empty folders suggesting troves of missing historical data) strike an almost anachronistic note of realia, while Inigo Mangiano-Ovalle’s Storm Prototype features two suspended fiberglass and titanium alloy foil clouds that make a “heavy” note, reminding us of another kind of wireless atmosphere, above us day and night.
Seeing the Unseeable: Data Design Art Exhibit runs until February 15 Location Roulet Williamson Gallery at ArtCenter 1700 Lida St. Pasadena, CA 91103 Wednesday through Saturday 12:00 pm – 5:00 pm And by appointment.
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