Artistic Statement about current research and practice.

I am researching data within cities and how this can be represented, visualized and interpreted. Data from security tracking, traffic, and environmental monitoring can all be interpreted as a medium to make artworks. I seek to investigate new ways of comparing, conceptualizing and then visualizing complex concepts related to the relationship of emergent data and real space in the built environment. Through practice based research, a series of modular experimental artworks will be created to express the possibilities for our data-mediated future.

There are three strands of my working process; these involve collecting the data, visualizing the data, and then displaying the data. The outputs from the online interfaces and online visualizations can be realized as real time dynamic artworks as diverse as installations, and real objects, made out of new display materials back in physical space.

In all my work I try to exploit the changing dynamics of city life as a source for creativity and create meaningful artistic metaphors. I utilize new technologies and integrate new media artworks into the public domain as part of this ongoing research into the visualization of city space. In essence I am researching data as a medium for creativity and how meaningful experiences of our cities may result.

I was a NESTA Dreamtime Fellow from February 2004/5. During that time, I focused on new technologies and their relationship to urban space. As a consequence, for this Fellowship in the Creative and Performing Arts with AHRC, I now aim to research new technologies, sensors, motes, display technologies and interactive architectures. The proposal, 'The Emergent City' incorporates investigations into movements of people, the pollution in the air, the vibrations and sounds of city spaces. The archives of this data will be controlled via bespoke online interfaces that can re-form and re-contextualize experiences in real time, to make emergent artworks.

By investigating these data structures I aim to create new metaphors relevant to the experience of the city. The patterns we make, the visual and imaginative interpretations we give to real world events, are already being networked into retrievable data structures that can be re-imagined and source for information. These patterns disclose new ways of seeing the world. The value of gathering and re-presenting this data in artistic form, and then analyzing its impact and influence, lies in making meaning accessible to a wider audience.

Further research incorporates concepts for the relationship of mobile computing within urban space and the built environment. The aim is to make a piece of work (of series of works) that is affecting and effecting incorporating unique patterns and shapes that move around as you move around that are based on your data. These shapes will/can be changed via motion and sensor control. The sensors can be camera tracking, position control, temperature control, will all mediate the flow of data outputs to the displays. The work focuses the merging of new architectural philosophies, networked intelligent data and new materiality.

I would sum up my aim as the intention of creating a visual art work informed by critical analysis of data-cities.

Stanza@Sublime.net