Chicago Art Exhibit: "Data Mining"

in Leviton A+D Gallery, Columbia College, Chicago, IL.

... In "Data Mining," information becomes a muse, an avant-garde material and a subject that's ideal for a conceptual age in which art is valued more for its ideas than for how it looks. Curated by designer William Linehan and artist Terence Hannum, this intriguing exhibition about the ways artists visualize data includes a few significant projects but suffers from serious technical problems, including breakdowns.

Paul Slocum's ingenious Pi House hit a nice groove, however, after running for 196 hours when I visited the show. The piece's custom software generates house music based on a computer's calculation of pi's decimal places, but its life is finite: The number of decimal places it must tabulate will eventually exceed its processing power. Mark Napier's Pam Standing (2009) is also noteworthy, for its fractured vision of a Google image search for Pamela Anderson. The artist's computer program dices up paparazzi photos into body parts, which it superimposes over a crude stick figure, yielding a freaky animated portrait of the sex symbol.

"Data Mining" features only lesser works by new-media pioneers Lev Manovich and Lynn Hershman Leeson and omits local artists Jason Salavon and Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle. I wonder why. Towering figures in this genre, they prove that data-driven art can be visually stunning, art-historically informed and shaped by important issues.

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From The New Dataist: The Catalog of "Data Mining" exhibit (PDF, 8.5 MB).

They use quantification over emotion to distill a reasoned patterning within the numbers. This is their passion. The irony being, as witnessed in the exhibition Data Mining /Artists' Constructs, this ostensibly dry, mechanical type of process yields gems of insight and circumspection about us the windows gazers and data streamers. A language reemerges, a connectivity. The Dataists, when their numbers and algorithms align, reveal patterns that become windows into ourselves in a broader context of societal meaning and being.