Artists throughout history have helped us to see and challenge the world, so their perspectives are crucial when it comes to understanding the impact of data and technology. For World Art Day (which was last Saturday 15 April) we enlisted the help of art curator Hannah Redler-Hawes to choose and write this month’s Rows and Columns feature. Hannah combines her role as Director of the Data as Culture art programme at the Open Data Institute with her independent practice. Here’s Hannah’s choice:
Is climate prediction a game of chance or skill? Julie Freeman’s artwork More Than Us (2023) combines historic, current and predicted climate-related data to offer us a glimpse of the astronomically huge data space framing this question.
In her digital installation – which is on permanent display at Hiscox Headquarters in London – communities of colourful geometric shapes, drawn from 19th century modernist painting, congregate and ebb and flow in response to the data. Some navigate raw, unstructured data. Others, driven by pronounced data patterns emerging from an artificial neural network, appear more purposeful.
The climate data sets have been built using data from Hiscox partners RMS and Verisk. Julie encourages us to think in a more-than-human way, arguing that chance and randomness will always influence our predictions. Julie Freeman is an artist who works with natural systems and emergent technologies. Since the 1990s her large scale installations have pioneered her conceptual and critical approach to working with data as a living art material.
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