Digital Realism: Visualising the social through digital art practice

How can digital artists use the vast amounts of digital data we produce on a daily basis ('big data') to tell stories about ourselves and our lives?

In an era when public issues of concern are increasingly framed, mirrored and played out as exchanges and circulations of data (e.g. via Twitter and Facebook), we are told that big data technologies promise fundamental changes in our ability to represent and understand human behaviour. These approaches offer distinctively new ways of capturing what we do through analysis of how we interact with the Internet's digital services and through the data traces we leave behind us in this process. Given enough computing power, argue advocates, the patterns revealed in these datasets have the potential to reveal solutions to some of our most pressing social, economic, political, and environmental issues.

This research suggests that just as documentary forms arising from photography and film have historically sought to use technology to tell stories about our human lives, big data technologies may offer distinctively new ways to represent us through the ways they capture the data we produce through our everyday activities.

We will produce prototype artworks in the form of visualisations, animations, large-scale static images and digital 3D models derived from social data sets. Current approaches in big data, focus on how it can be employed in a commercial setting by using data derived from social media for example, to target customers more effectively. Similar approaches in science research seek correlations in scientific data to better understand interactions in natural systems. However this proposed project will represent the patterns of human activity discovered in big data to tell stories about what we believe in, what we do and who we are. Visualisations are an effective way of doing this as they take abstract and difficult to understand information and turn it into image forms that make data comprehensible.

As the world around us, and our activity within it, is increasingly marked by the data traces we leave behind, there exists a pressing need for the kinds of exploratory work this project proposes. Specifically research looks to find ways of bringing to attention aspects of the social overlooked in normative big data approaches. From a creative perspective there is scope to foreground the interpretive nature of big data, reflect upon what is missing in its coverage and find ways of depicting these absences.

Research unites digital arts researchers from the University of Westminster with expertise in visualisation and digital arts practice with social geographers from the Oxford Internet Institute, Oxford University, whose research is concerned with how certain groups and communities are excluded from digital data sets.

A project website will document research and act as a platform to publish artworks produced during the project which will be made freely available to the public. Similarly all computer code and wherever possible data sets will be released to the public and wider research community. A free conference open to the public that includes academics, digital artists and designers and other specialists will be held at project end to debate the consequences and benefits of research and discuss ways of taking work forward.

Given the interest in the topic of big data and the interdisciplinary nature of the project we posit a number of different kinds of non-academic beneficiaries across a range of areas:

-Digital art and design practitioner groups interested in gaining access to specific knowledge and understanding of data driven approaches to art and design practice. Research delivers significant additional value for practitioner groups by producing models of practice, production insights and technological innovation in artwork design and production. Access to research occurs via attendance at the final public conference and through access to artworks, annotated code, data sets and design notes published on the project website. We will widely publicize the project to this group through a social media presence, via relevant mailing lists, blogs and newsgroups (e.g. Furtherfield, Rhizome) and through the PIs extensive networks of contacts in the field of digital art and design.

-Cultural and museum organizations looking for clear guidance and insights into the emerging potentials of big data as a cultural phenomena. There is considerable interest in the topic of big data from organizations such as Lighthouse Digital Culture Agency (Brighton) and the Arts Catalyst (London) amongst others, with the former already working in collaboration with the Open Data Institute to explore the ramifications of open data for cultural practice. We have already had initial contact with the Arts Catalyst and Museum of London who are interested in the project, and the Arts Catalyst and the Open Data Institute have agreed to constitute an impact steering committee alongside members of the research team. The project potentially delivers significant insights for these organizations into how big data can function as a tool to representation of social realities. Research will provide better understanding of what our data is telling us about the world, which is directly relevant to the mission of these organisations to engender public understanding of technology through cultural production. Dissemination of research to these groups occurs through the final conference and via the website. Initial meetings with the Museum of London have scoped the possibility for an exhibition of visual outputs in the Museum's Sackler Gallery post-funded project period.

-Policy groups in culture and technology such as the Open Data Institute have existing projects such as Data as Culture which seek to raise awareness of how data has cultural and political ramifications and which seek to promote good practice in its use. Additionally organisations such as NESTA and the Arts Council are actively engaged with exploring the wider ramifications of big data to the cultural and creative industries. These groups derive benefits from research in that it builds out from their existing initiatives concerned with commerce and audience services, through a critical approach to big data with particular focus on issues of representation of social groups. Access to research will occur via invitation to public events, the Open Data Institute are acting as an impact partner and will participate in the conference at end of project.

-Policy groups concerned with the digital divide. The Oxford Internet Institute (OII) has a number of links with policy groups involved in discussions around social inclusion (e.g. Department for International Development, SciDev). We would expect research into imaging under-represented groups to be of interest to these organisations as it allows comprehension of gaps in digital provision relevant to their research focus. Policy groups will be informed of pertinent outputs via the OII, the website and social media presence, and through invitation to the final public-facing conference.