<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Catherine asks,</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">"Do people know of artists or cultural producers who have tried to visualize/expose power flows through Big Data ecosystems?”</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">On <a href="http://Turbulence.org" class="">Turbulence.org</a> some gorgeous and provocative projects take this exposure on. One is Luke Dubois’ Hard Data (2009). He writes: "Hard Data is a data-mining, sonification, and visualization project that uses statistics from the American military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq as source material for an interactive audiovisual composition based around an open-source “score” of events. Using Xenakis’ understanding of formalized music as a starting point, DuBois draws upon a variety of statistical data ranging from the visceral (civilian deaths, geospatial renderings of military actions) to the mundane (fiscal year budgets for the war) to generate a dataset that can be used for any number of audiovisual compositions. The intention of the project is to recontextualize the formal stochastic music in the context of real-world statistics, and to provide a compositional and metaphoric framework for creating an electroacoustic music relevant and significant to our time.” <a href="http://turbulence.org/project/hard-data/#" class="">http://turbulence.org/project/hard-data/#</a></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">If---as Orit Halprin observes, “Postwar design and communication sciences, believing the world to be inundated with data, produced new tactics of management for which observers had to be trained and the mind reconceived”, </div><div class="">inducing, like forced labor, “a range of new tactics, and imaginaries , for the management and orchestration of life,” —— the reverse direction can also be observed in Luke’s Hard Data— here the orchestration of life sonifies</div><div class="">as a symphonic texture on war, death. </div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Yet Catherine, you’re casting out this query in a slightly different key— one that strikes on a properly design research question…. if Luke’s project deconstructs the military data for a stochastic music, this is ‘enough’ as an aesthetic-political gesture- yet you are wanting something more, a tool or machine that can help people with equity and justice goals, right? “Hard Data” visualizes/exposes …. but there’s more here… </div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">You also ask, “In my work this has translated to working on data literacy in order to do my small part to counteract these imbalances and to get more voices to the table, particularly journalists, artists, educators, policymakers. What might taking a feminist approach mean for interrogating, intervening in this asymmetry</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">As an example, here’s a start up that works on making financing available for small scale projects in affordable housing, schools, and other projects by local public agencies in the US — <a href="https://neighborly.com/minibonds" class="">https://neighborly.com/minibonds</a></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">It’s an intervention into the mainstream system of bond finance for public projects that makes it possible for anyone to approach possibilities for investing in local projects— in a way it goes one step beyond Kickstarter and similar</div><div class="">crowd-funding venues. Does this kind of new business interface connect the dots in a way that makes sense to ‘counteract these imbalances and get more voices to the table..’ literally by funding education through these micro-bonds?</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">On a much larger scale, in light of your questions, it’s interesting to look at a very large data visualization project that has an explicit goal of putting big data analysis to use, for provoking political change and economic resource improvement for women and girls around the world. Certainly only possible with the funding backing of the Gates Foundation and the Clinton Foundation! <a href="http://noceilings.org" class="">http://noceilings.org</a></div><div class=""> </div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">The website indicates Includes approximately 850,000 data points on 1,000 indicators across 10 categories from 1995-2014. <a href="http://noceilings.org/report/report.pdf" class="">http://noceilings.org/report/report.pdf</a></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">-c</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">On Jul 3, 2016, at 2:49 AM, kanarinka <<a href="mailto:kanarinka@ikatun.org" class="">kanarinka@ikatun.org</a>> wrote:</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------</div><div class="">One aspect of taking a feminist approach to data visualization that I have been thinking about a great deal has less to do with visualization and more to do with equity and justice concerns around the distribution of data and the products that come from it. </div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Big Data, medium data and even small data are all asymmetric in the sense that:</div><div class="">- who has the capacity to collect and store the data is not equally distributed (basically it's large corporations and states)</div><div class="">- access to data is not equally distributed (those collecting agencies are selective when it comes to what data is "open", it's debatable whether some of the data called "open" actually is open or not, i.e. PDFs)</div><div class="">- know-how to analyze and make meaning (or "business intelligence") from data is not equally distributed (see Kate Crawford's recent article "Artificial Intelligence's White Guy Problem" - <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/26/opinion/sunday/artificial-intelligences-white-guy-problem.html?_r=0" class="">http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/26/opinion/sunday/artificial-intelligences-white-guy-problem.html?_r=0</a>)</div><div class="">- understanding of impacts is not transparent - actions and decisions that result from data and often have serious consequences are not transparent. I.e. if someone is being denied a loan, it's not clear what part of the algorithm flagged them</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">In my work this has translated to working on data literacy in order to do my small part to counteract these imbalances and to get more voices to the table, particularly journalists, artists, educators, policymakers. </div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">What might taking a feminist approach mean for interrogating, intervening in this asymmetry? Do people know of artists or cultural producers who have tried to visualize/expose power flows through Big Data ecosystems? </div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">///////////////////////////// </div><div class=""><a href="mailto:kanarinka@ikatun.org" class="">kanarinka@ikatun.org</a> || @kanarinka || +1 617 501 2441 || <a href="http://www.kanarinka.com" class="">www.kanarinka.com</a></div><div class="">_______________________________________________</div><div class="">empyre forum</div><div class=""><a href="mailto:empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au" class="">empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au</a></div><div class=""><a href="http://empyre.library.cornell.edu" class="">http://empyre.library.cornell.edu</a></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div apple-content-edited="true" class="">
<div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><br class="Apple-interchange-newline">Christina McPhee</div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><br class=""></div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><a href="http://christinamcphee.net" class="">http://christinamcphee.net</a></div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><br class=""></div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><br class=""><br class=""></div></div>
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