Michelle Forrest, Steve Dutton

Data-Voice

Let us be clear. This project, with a working title of ‘Data -Voice’ is in its embryonic stages.
Indeed, it is predicated on the very nature of the embryo, for we propose that there is a force of life in the world of data, which is as yet shrouded, yet to find voice and emerge into the daylight.

As a newly forming collaborative duo our aim and focus is to come together to turn our respective methods, histories, narratives and processes towards the Mattering of Data in the world, through artistic means. There are of course a plethora of internet and installation based data visualisation projects which contribute enormously to any thinking and feeling about data as a field of the poetic or aesthetic. However, our aim is not to visualise as such (although we imagine the  visual may still play a key role in the process)  but in effect to play with the  wider sensory qualities emergent within the field of data, to recognise and summon  the internal life of data and to let the data voice itself through the various artistic means we wish to employ and test.

We propose then, no less than a form of Data Metempsychosis, where the soul of one datum travels into the soul of another and where there is new life borne through this processes of transmogrification.

If we can destabilise various ontological ‘norms’, such as writing, speaking, imaging, seeing and listening through the exploration, reflection and application of data then  we may be on the right track. Perhaps we are effectively trying to create a new ‘noise’ which emerges from a mix of behavioural and semiotic classifications. But who knows? The supportive, yet critical, frame of Various Rehearsals in ‘Crisis Collective’ offers an opportunity to test a number of data/poetic propositions in the context of the borderlines which can be inhabited within artistic research. As the invitation to “Various Rehearsals” is to “let it blossom, let it bleed” then we would feel in good company.

Click here to view the remains of this cancelled presentation on Research Catalogue

Steve Dutton is an artist, researcher and curator who works on both collaborative and individual projects. He is a Professor of Fine Art at Bath School of Art, Bath Spa University where he is Director of the Art Research Centre.

Michelle Forrest is an artist. Her experience working in the data industry for the last two decades has become a major part of her thinking in her thinking through practice based research.