[-empyre-] Visualization between robotics and baked goods

Tue Jul 12 03:22:52 AEST 2016

Let me just say quickly that I love the project! It made me laugh and I
love that the idea is to bring pies to other locales to start a
conversation. Also, this is a really good sentence:
"It’s a feminist food robot that visualizes the gender gap in art and tech
workplaces on edible pies."

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Assistant Professor of Civic Media and Data Visualization, Emerson College
Fellow, Emerson Engagement Lab
Research Affiliate, MIT Center for Civic Media
www.kanarinka.com | @kanarinka | 617-501-2441

On Mon, Jul 11, 2016 at 11:35 AM Annina Ruest <arust at syr.edu> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Hello!
>
> I very much enjoyed reading last week’s discussion! Catherine, thank you
> for linking the Bardzell article about feminist HCI!
>
> So how does my work connect to the topic of feminist data visualization?
> (disclosure: a paragraph or two of the text is copied from a paper I wrote
> in 2014). The cited links are at the bottom of the text.
>
> In 2013, I exhibited the first version of my project “A Piece of the Pie
> Chart” [1 a, b, c, etc.]. It’s a feminist food robot that visualizes the
> gender gap in art and tech workplaces on edible pies. Inspired by
> industrial production lines, the gallery installation consists of a
> computer workstation and a food robot. The food robot puts pie charts
> depicting the gender gap in ratio form onto edible, pre-baked pies. The
> data changes depending on where the project is exhibited. Visitors use the
> robot to create pies using an automatized assembly line. As part of the
> process, pictures of the pies are automatically disseminated via Twitter.
> Visitors can then take the pies to their own workplace to start a
> discussion with colleagues or mail the pies to the workplaces where the
> data originated to remind those in charge how large/small the slice of the
> art and tech pies women can claim for themselves.
>
> In “A Piece of the Pie Chart”, I am combining visualization of gender data
> stemming from art and tech workplaces with action. Mapping gender data onto
> edible pies adds material representation to gender statistics. The pies are
> a multisensory symbol explaining how women fare in art and tech. They show
> that women receive a small share of what this kind of work has to offer.
> This data mapping style adds urgency to the feminist cause: It is not a
> data visualization to be passively consumed. What comes out of the machine
> is an object along with instructions to mail it to the place where the data
> originated. It asks people to take action and gives them directions for
> mailing or tweeting the pies.
>
> To those receiving the pie tweets, it might not be obvious that the pies
> are decorated by a robot. But the robotic part is important. The robot
> performs for the audience in the exhibition. The project is inspired by by
> the data visualization language of the feminist protest movement in art. It
> is a visualization style that actively and overtly seeks social justice for
> women (artists). This visualization work often uses performance, humor, and
> collaboration as a strategy to get a point across in a disarming but
> nonetheless insistent way. This includes a critical relationship to
> quantitative data and data visualization itself. Some examples for this
> feminist visualization style are the Gallery Tally Project (directed by
> Micol Hebron) [2], the work of the Guerilla Girls [3], and the work of the
> Los Angeles Council of Women Artists and affiliated groups who were
> protesting LACMA in the 1970s [4]. and 1980s [5] with data and
> visualization and are still collecting data today. Some of these groups
> work within the art system. But they may also just show up uninvited to
> create visualizations. A recent example for this is the “Where is Ana
> Mendieta?” protest at the Tate [6]. Many of these protesters past and
> present have exposed themselves to great personal risk in creating these
> visualizations (I have not – at least not recently).
>
> I think that it’s good to think about how feminist data visualization can
> be defined to heighten the importance of the genre to data visualization,
> design, HCI, art, and culture more broadly. Here is something I am a bit
> conflicted about: I am worried that designers & technologists may take a
> definition of feminist data visualization (or HCI) and try to add it to
> their project as an ingredient that will make their project instantly
> feminist (yum!) instead of thinking about the gender implications of their
> work more broadly. In my experience, I would say that most feminist data
> visualizations that I know of do not check all the boxes of what feminist
> data visualization is (and can be). And this does not make them any less
> powerful or take away from the fact that they are examples of feminist data
> visualization as a developing historical genre in art, design, and tech.
>
>
> Links:
>
> [1a] This is a video of the first iteration of A Piece of the Pie Chart
> using low-cost toy robotics: https://vimeo.com/79534316
>
> [1b] This is a video the second iteration as it was exhibited at the
> Art+Tech lab at LACMA in 2015: https://vimeo.com/129279879
>
> [1c] To give exhibition visitors a chance to draw not just pre-curated
> gender data onto pies, I created a robot in 2015 that draws pie charts
> directly onto a pie using edible marker on rice paper
> https://vimeo.com/121100639 . I exhibited it at Haus der Elektronischen
> Künste (Basel) in the context of Critical Make, a critical Maker Faire. I
> was there for about a week asking people what kinds of data they would like
> to have visualized on a pie and encouraging them to take the pies to their
> workplaces to discuss economic inequality.
>
> [1d] I also built an interactive website called “A Piece of (In)equality”
> http://www.anninaruest.com/pieceofinequality/ that helps me collect data
> and visualize it on pies.
>
> [1e] Together with the awesome Micol Hebron, I organized a feminist data
> collect-a-thon at LACMA in 2015. Participants brought their own data, but
> we also worked with data from the LACMA collection. Here are some examples:
>
> [1f] And last but not least, I wrote about my project in the context of
> data visualization:
>
> Data as Feminist Protest (2014)
> http://unframed.lacma.org//2014/07/10/data-as-feminist-protest/
>
> And feminist data visualization and robotics:
> http://anninaruest.com/papers/SiggraphPaper1.pdf
>
>
> [2]  http://gallerytally.tumblr.com/
>
> [3]  http://www.guerrillagirls.com
>
> [4]
> http://blogs.getty.edu/pacificstandardtime/explore-the-era/archives/i143/
>
> [5]  http://bit.ly/29JAqLw
>
> [6] http://www.huckmagazine.com/perspectives/reportage-2/ana-tate/
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