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Visiting\u00a0😹\u00a0LMAO at London’s Open Data Institute for<\/a> New Scientist,\u00a02 February 2018<\/a><\/p>\n On Friday 12 January 2018, curators Julie Freeman and Hannah Redler Hawes left work at London\u2019s Open Data Institute confident that, come Monday morning, there would be at least a few packets of crisps in the office.<\/p>\n Artist Ellie Harrison\u2018s Vending Machine (2009; pictured below) sits in the ODI\u2019s kitchen, one of the more venerable exhibits to have been acquired over the institute\u2019s five-year programme celebrating data as culture. It has been hacked to dispense a packet of salty snacks whenever the BBC\u2019s RSS feed carries a news item containing financial misfortune.<\/p>\n No one could have guessed that, come 7 am on Monday morning, Carillion, the UK government\u2019s giant services contractor, would have gone into liquidation. There were so many packets in the hopper, no one could open the door, say staff.<\/p>\n Such apparently silly anecdotes are the stuff of this year\u2019s show, the fifth in the ODI\u2019s annual exhibition series \u201cData as Culture\u201d. This year, humour and absurdity are being harnessed to ask big questions about internet culture, privacy and artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n Looking at the world through algorithmic lenses may bring occasional insight, but what really matters here are the pratfalls as, time and again, our machines misconstrue a world they cannot possibly comprehend.<\/p>\n In 2017, artist Pip Thornton fed famous poems to Google\u2019s online advertising service, Google AdWords, and printed the monetised results on till receipts. The framed results value the word \u201ccloud\u201d (as in I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud by William Wordsworth) highly, at \u00a34.73, presumably because Google\u2019s algorithm was dreaming of internet servers. It had no time at all for Wilfred Owen: \u201cFroth-corrupted\u201d (Dulce et Decorum Est) earned exactly \u00a30.00.<\/p>\n You can, of course, reverse this game and ask what happens to people when they over-interpret machine-generated data, seeing patterns that aren\u2019t there.<\/p>\n This is what Lee Montgomery has done with Stupidity Tax (2017). In an effort to understand his father\u2019s mild but unaccountably secretive gambling habit, Montgomery has used a variety of data analysis techniques to attempt to predict the UK National Lottery. The sting in this particular tale is the installation\u2019s associated website, which implies (mischievously, I hope) that the whole tongue-in-cheek effort has driven the artist ever so slightly mad.<\/p>\n Watching over the whole exhibition \u2013 literally because it\u2019s peeking through a hole in a ceiling tile \u2013 is Franco and Eva Mattes\u2019s Ceiling Cat, a taxidermied realisation of the internet meme, and a comment on the nature of surveillance beliefs (pictured top). \u201cIt\u2019s cute and scary at the same time,\u201d the artists say, \u201clike the internet.\u201d<\/p>\n Co-curator Freeman is a data artist herself. If you visited last year\u2019s New Scientist Live you may well have seen her naked mole-rat surveillance project. The 7.5 million data points acquired by the project are now keeping network analysts busy at Queen Mary University of London. \u201cWe want to know if mole-rats make good encryption objects,\u201d says Freeman. Their nest behaviours might generate true random numbers, handy for data security. \u201cBut the mole-rat queens are far too predictable\u2026 Crisp?\u201d<\/p>\n Through a mouthful of salt and vinegar, I ask Freeman where her playfulness comes from. And as I suspected, there\u2019s intellectual steel beneath: \u201cData is being constantly visualised so we can comprehend it,\u201d she says, \u201cand those visualisations are often done in a very short space of time, for a particular purpose, in a particular context, for a particular audience. Then they acquire this afterlife. All of a sudden, they\u2019re the lenses we\u2019re looking through. If you start thinking about data as something rigid and objective and bearing the weight of truth, then you\u2019ve stopped discerning what is right and what is wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n Freeman wants us to analyse data, not abandon it, and her exhibition is an act of tough love. \u201cWhen we fetishise data, we end up with what\u2019s happening in social media,\u201d she says. \u201cSo many people drowning in metadata, pointing to pointers, and never acquiring any knowledge that\u2019s deep and valuable. There should be some words to express that glut, that need to roll back a little bit. Here, have another crisp.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Visiting\u00a0😹\u00a0LMAO at London’s Open Data Institute for New Scientist,\u00a02 February 2018 On Friday 12 January 2018, curators Julie Freeman and Hannah Redler Hawes left work at London\u2019s Open Data Institute confident that, come Monday morning, there would be at least … Continue reading