Revealing invisible data
LL38 – Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost by Tiziana Alocci
This month we’re featuring London-based data artist Tiziana Alocci. Her practice explores how to visualise things that are hard to measure or often overlooked – emotions, personal stories, and other intangible traces of the human experience.
We heard Tiziana speak at Kingston University about a recent project that uses Google Street View to collect snapshots of London’s vanishing sky over a 16-year period. She later added sound, introducing the emotional layer missing from the images alone. The project became Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost, and is now being developed into a book about data absence.
Tracking the invisible could be applied to many of the issues we care about. From biodiversity loss, ecological change and migration to people’s relationships with landscapes, subjects rarely fit neatly into conventional datasets. Across her portfolio, Tiziana has explored topics ranging from noise pollution to the meaning of home.
Tiziana told us: “Absence of data is data, and its absence is telling a story. Datasets always look boring before you listen to them. Not all data needs to be analysed. Sometimes it can be just experienced. I’m glad when people don’t ask ‘what does this chart mean?’ and they just listen to the data, which is the whole point”. Tiziana talks about her latest project, Frequencies of Belonging, in her most recent newsletter.
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