Data Through Design: Hidden in Plain Sight Exhibition

Visit the annual Data Through Design Exhibition during Open Data Week!

DxD is an annual exhibition celebrating tangible and multimedia expressions of New York City’s Open Data. It provides space for creative engagement with data and new perspectives and understanding of its role in our society.

Where: Prime Produce, 424 West 54th Street New York, NY 10019 United States

When: March 11-19; gallery hours 12pm – 7pm

Opening Reception: Friday, March 10th, 6:00 – 8:30 PM EST
Follow the link to RSVP for the Opening Night on March 10th!

Hidden in Plain Sight

The intention of most datasets is to tell a story about the collective: they are designed, collected, and analyzed with a question about “the whole” in mind, smoothing over individualities and compacting lived experiences into a singular tale of “us.” This year we are looking for work that explores the smaller stories and voices that are hidden by this wider narrative as told by big data. We invite artists to complicate data trends and commonly held narratives, search for missing people/places/things in data, investigate anomalies and outliers, and draw back the curtain on the “invisible hands” that shape data to expose, question and engage the perspective and motives behind data collection.

Some of the questions we’ve been thinking about include:

• Where is the individual visible within a given dataset? How am I seen or hidden among the greater data-driven narrative?
• What happens when data is used in ways that weren’t intended?
• What lived experiences are overwritten by large trends? How can we counter the tendency of that overwriting?
• What truths are hidden within data errors, glitches, outliers, and anomalies? Who, what, and why, do we consider an outlier, a glitch, or “not the normal”?

We encourage artists to embrace the theme as a prompt — conceptually, analytically, and experimentally; as a point of departure, or as a subject.

Hidden in Plain Sight Artists and Projects:

Kerrie O’Leary: N.Y. sea

Sarah Sachs, Becky Xu, and Sourabh Chakraborty: Hidden Layers | The Voices that Shape NYC Zoning

Katrin Bichler, Aurelie Barbier, Aron Cohen, and Julie McEldoon: A Matter of Air

Zeana Llamas, John Noonan, and Forest Eckhardt: Kindling

Living Interfaces Lab: Elizabeth Henaff with Sheila Atieno, Tori Coleman, Andrea Sanchez: Holobiont Urbanism 2022: Be(e)yond What Meets the Eye

Shirley Wu: w̶o̶n̶d̶e̶r̶

Ambar Reyes: Los delivereros

Tara Lee Burns: Disappearing Data

Susan Steinfield: Where are we going?