Medialab Prado

Amber Frid-Jimenez will address 'Data Is Political,' a new research project that examines the relationship between art, design and the politics of information. Radical increases in computing power and speed together with the rhetoric of openness and organizational transparency have led to a desire to read, visualize and make sense of vast and expanding archives of digital information from financial data and government documents to global sporting events and personal video collections. Corporations storing unprecedented archives of data on their servers have called on artists and designer to lead efforts to visualize this information, producing new opportunities to use their skills on problems of seductive complexity. Often such initiatives are framed as promoting the public good. But the act of storing, structuring, and visualizing can conceal as well as reveal underlying structures and global networks. Far from value neutral, the act of visualizing information occurs within a complex and contentious field of competing agendas. Simply put, data is political.

Over the past fifty years, artists and designers have developed tactics that explore, remix and interrogate cultural archives as products of carefully constructed, state controlled systems of knowledge. Artists and politicians understand the value of these knowledge systems and use them as opportunities to challenge the organization of-- and the rules of access to-- and distribution methods of this cultural data. What are the aesthetic, ethical and spatial dimensions of information and its relation to power, the production of knowledge, and construction of urban spaces? How does the scale of expanding databases affect the creative practices of artists and designers working within public or private sectors? What strategies do designers and artists use to negotiate the competing aims of agencies with a stake in the information that are represented?