Data Pseudomorphs

School of Machines, Making & Make-Believe presents a 5-wk online class on developing an artistic and meaningful collective data practise.

How can we create individual and collective meaning through the exploration of our data?

/ Five-week Live* Online class begins 16. November ends 14. December
/ Every Tuesday, 8pm-10pm CET
/ Small class of participants
/ For tickets and more info please visit https://www.eventbrite.de/e/data-pseudomorphs-tickets-167611427291

Course Description

This course draws from medical art history and feminist data practice, with a focus on collecting data about oneself and bringing such data into the physical world as tangible objects. Working with bodily data is difficult: challenging to collect practically; emotionally hard to look at; and politically or socially problematic. We refer to the objects produced during such subversive, critical data projects as “data pseudomorphs,” inspired by the inky false form ejected by cephalopods as camouflage.
This is a do-it-together (DIT) workshop, where the instructors offer exercises and approaches we’ve developed for playful, expressive data practices. During the first three sessions, each course participant is invited to construct tangible objects out of found materials and ask unusual questions about daily bodily existence. During the last two sessions, we expand from the individualized data practice to a collective one. This will bring feminist data practice, digital data analysis, and working with existing public datasets into the “data pseudomorph” toolkit.

The specific topic will be decided collaboratively, and as an initial suggestion, we will give some prompts and data related to tracking sleep: a complex personal experience, made all the more important by the general restlessness of our society. One interesting challenge of a collective bodily dataset is the notion of privacy and anonymity in the data - how can we organize this kind of group data project in a way that empowers all participants to share as much (or as little) of their data as they wish? Throughout the course, we consider the implications of how data collection is organized on what it can be used for, whom it can serve, and potential pitfalls.

Lecture segments will draw from contemporary multi-disciplinary art, as well as current research in human-computer interaction, information visualization, personal informatics, and the quantified self. In each session, we will guide 1-2 mark-making exercises; we’ve listed some recommended materials for each week, for all who wish to participate in the activities. Finally, each session will include a group discussion: through this course, we will collectively construct the idea of the creative “false form” (“data pseudomorph”) of bodily or societal data as a site for playful meaning-making.

Course Outline

Week 1: INTRODUCTION
Participant introductions. Introducing the key idea of building our own systems of observation and knowledge production of the “data body”.

Week 2: OBSERVATION
What is observation? How do we observe? Who observes? This week, we consider the use of external forms to mediate and make visible internal experience.

Week 3: UNCERTAINTY
We will draw from current information visualization and human-computer interaction literature on how to effectively work with uncertainty in data, and construct these normative methods against the expressive, subversive encodings of data in textile, fiber, and embroidery works.

Week 4: CREATING A COLLECTIVE DATASET
We will review some existing citizen science, data donation, and collective bio dataset projects, and then work together as a collective entity to create a survey/diary instrument that we can use ourselves.

Week 5: EXPLORING A COLLECTIVE DATASET
We will work together to understand and (re)present the collective dataset, beginning in additional external data. What can we learn in such a collective body data project individually? collectively?