Dataesthetics

The Atlas Group, Jean - Pierre Aubé, Bureau d’études, Center for Tactical Magic, IRWIN, Mark Lombardi, Trevor Paglen, Marko Peljhan/I-TASC, Martha Rosler, Bálint Szombathy, Mladen Stilinović, Visible Collective/ Mohaiemen, Roy, Huq, Lin
curated by: Stephen Wright

"Data has become the most pervasive – and intangibly invasive – feature of contemporary life; of life become data. Life systems have been the object of sustained data gathering since the time of the Enlightenment, and cartography, flow charts, graphs and statistica; databases have played a preponderant role in the shift from a society based on discipline to contemporary regimes of biopolitical control, where information is inseparable from the exercise of power. Though it is still commonly held that 'the map is not the territory' – that is, that life can neither be confused with nor certainly reduced to its informational content – the vast expansion in data gathering facilitated by digital nano-technologies and integrated networks suggests that a qualitative transformation in governance may become possible through the sheer quantity of available data. Is the dream of total management on the verge of becoming a reality, whereby action on the map is at the same time action on the territory? 'You have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide' has become the chorus of real-information ideologues; yet to be an individual is to have something to hide…
Artists have only comparatively recently come to take a sustained interest in the phenomenon of information display, classification, compiling – in short, in what might be referred to as dataesthetics.

This exhibition brings together twelve artists and artist collectives who use data as their artistic material. Working with cognitive mapping, discursive form, or envisaging knowledge production and research as a full-fledged artistic practice (rather than a prelude to producing artwork), these artists seek to foreground the heuristic and socially critical potential of data use.
Plainly, such practices have precedents in the conceptual art producers of an earlier generation, sharing with them a broad critique of administered lives, bureaucratised minds and instrumental rationality. Of course, the aesthetics of data is not merely about ordering facts and figures; it is equally about disorganising and subverting the rational arrangement of information and our reliance on databases. Dataesthetics seeks to foreground some of the most cutting-edge practices in the field of research-based art while at the same time anchoring them in an art-historical framework. From this perspective, it can be argued that the data-based practices of many contemporary artists give conceptual art the opportunity to potentially reinvent itself, giving it an unforeseen use value, by injecting artistic competence into collaborative initiatives beyond the confines of the artworld.
Dataesthetics is a three-phrase project, comprising an exhibition, a discussion forum with the artists and the publication of a bilingual reader, featuring critical writings by theorists and artists working in the field of dataesthetics."
Stephen Wright

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