[spectre] DATA DRIFT Exhibition - open till November 22, in Riga

Rasa Smite rasa at rixc.lv
Tue Oct 27 10:23:58 CET 2015


Hello!

Please find below more info on the exhibition - DATA DRIFT, which is 
co-curated by Lev Manovich, Raitis Smits and myself, and produced by 
RIXC, as a part of the annual festival and new Renewable Futures conference.

The exhibition is open till November 22, 2015 in kim? Contemporary art 
center in Riga, Spikeri Creative Quartier - and, i believe, it is worth 
to come to Riga to see it! :)

kind regards,
Rasa Smite
RIXC.ORG


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DATA DRIFT
Exhibition
October 10 – November 22, 2015
Venue: kim? Contemporary Art Centre in Riga

The DATA DRIFT exhibition showcases works by some of the most 
influential data designers of our time, as well as by artists who use 
data as their artistic medium. How can we use the data medium to 
represent our complex societies, going beyond "most popular," and "most 
liked"? How can we organize the data drifts that structure our lives to 
reveal meaning and beauty? (And can we still think of "beauty" given our 
growing concerns with privacy and commercial uses of data we share?) How 
to use big data to "make strange," so we can see past and present as 
unfamiliar and new?

If painting was the art of the classical era, and photograph that of the 
modern era, data visualization is the medium of our own time. Rather 
than looking at the outside worldwide and picturing it in interesting 
ways like modernist artists (Instagram filters already do this well), 
data designers and artists are capturing and reflecting on the new data 
realities of our societies. 


C
urated by Lev MANOVICH, Rasa SMITE and Raitis SMITS, the exhibition 
features artworks and data visualizations by SPIN Unit (EU), Moritz 
STEFANER (DE), Frederic BRODBECK (DE), Kim ALBRECHT (DE), Boris MÜLLER 
(DE), Marian DÖRK (DE), Benjamin GROSSER (US), Maximilian SCHICH 
(DE/US), Mauro MARTINO (IT/US), Periscopic (US), Pitch Interactive (US), 
Smart Citizen Team (ES), Lev MANOVICH / Software Studies Initiative 
(US), Daniel GODDEMEYER (DE/US), Dominikus BAUR (DE), Mehrdad YAZDANI 
(US), Alise TIFENTALE (LV/US), Jay CHOW (US), Semiconductor (UK), Rasa 
SMITE, Raitis SMITS / RIXC (LV), Martins RATNIKS (LV), Kristaps EPNERS (LV).

Exhibition website:
http://rixc.org/en/festival/DATA%20DRIFT/


The DATA DRIFT exhibition is as part of the new Renewable Futures 
conference series. The first edition of the conference took place in 
Riga from October 8 to 10, 2015 in the framework of the annual RIXC Art 
Science festival.

The first Renewable Futures conference gathered over 85 delegates from 
25 countries – media theorists and art historians, artists and 
scientists, as well as academic researchers and independent cultural 
workers from different universities, science institutes, art centers and 
cultural organizations. Launched by RIXC and its partners from Renewable 
Network in 2015, the Renewable Futures is a traveling conference series 
for art, science and cultural innovation in Baltic Sea and North 
European region. The first Riga edition of the conference is focusing on 
transformative potential of art in the age of post-media.

http://renewablefutures.net

O

n the occasion of the exhibition, also the new issue of the Acoustic 
Space journal series is out now – with the title “DATA DRIFT. Archiving 
Media and Data Art in the 21st century”. This volume is edited by Rasa 
SMITE, Raitis SMITS and Lev MANOVICH, and it includes a catalog section 
of DATA DRIFT exhibition, as well as the papers by the Media Art 
Histories (Riga, 2013) conference participants, and new texts by 
Renewable Futures conference speakers. The DATA DRIFT volume will be 
available via amazon.com (from the beginning of November), as well as by 
ordering via email: rixc (at) rixc.org, and/or via website:
http://acousticspacejournal.com

The DATA DRIFT exhibition will be open till November 22, 2015.
V

enue: kim? Contemporary Art Center gallery, Maskavas street 12/1, 
Spikeri Creative Quartier, Riga, Latvia.

Opening hours: Mo – closed, Tue 12:00-20:00, Wed–Sun 12:00-18:00

The exhibition is produced by RIXC, The Center for New Media Culture

http://rixc.org



Contact:
rixc (at) rixc.org, +371-67228478 (RIXC office), rasa (at) rixc.org, 
+371-26546776 




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DATA DRIFT Exhibition Artists and Artworks
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A SENSE OF PLACE (2015)
SPIN Unit

When we talk about the urban fabric, we are led to consider the urban 
landscape as a physical arrangement defined by objects, voids and their 
visible relations. For decades, the field of urban morphology has sought 
to unveil, measure and study these relations to learn more about the 
evolution of the city form. At the same time Social media has become a 
common feature of our everyday life. For researchers, social media 
provides large amounts of readily accessible, on-time and qualitatively 
rich data that can be used to study urban activities and people’s 
interactions. The specific characteristics of different forms of social 
media, such as Twitter, Instagram and Foursquare, open different avenues 
for both quantitative and qualitative analysis.
In this work we are aim to hack the invisible city, leverage the secret 
strengths of urban spaces, and explore how the many characters, all the 
different layers of the urban fabric come together.

Aiming to combine art and science to study urban phenomena, SPIN Unit 
has coalesced into an international network of professionals. Although 
based in Tallinn, SPIN currently has ten members across Europe.

http://www.spinunit.eu

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THE EXCEPTIONAL AND THE EVERYDAY: 144 HOURS IN KYIV (2014)
Lev Manovich (USA), Mehrdad Yazdani (USA), Alise Tifentale (Latvia / 
USA), Jay Chow (USA)

“The Exceptional and the Everyday: 144 hours in Kyiv” is the first 
project to analyze the use of Instagram during a social upheaval using 
computational and visualization techniques. We explore how during the 
exceptional events, the exceptional co-exists with the (Instagram) 
everyday. The visualization shown in the exhibition includes all 13,208 
images shared by 6,165 Instagram users in central part of Kyiv during 
February 17–22, 2014 (the week of 2014 Maidan Revolution). The images 
are organized by shared date/time, top to bottom and left to right. The 
images of Maidan clashes, political slogans, and burned cars and 
buildings appear right next to everything else. People continue their 
lives and post their “likes” as on any other day. The exceptional 
co-exists with the everyday. We saw this in the collected images, and 
this was our motivation to begin this project.

Dr. Lev Manovich is the author of seven books including The Language of 
New Media (The MIT Press, 2001). Manovich is a Professor at The Graduate 
Center, CUNY, and a Director of the Software Studies Initiative. In 2014 
he was included in the list of 50 "most interesting people building the 
future" (The Verge). Dr. Mehrdad Yazdani is research scientist in 
Qualcomm Institute at California Institute for Telecommunication and 
Information, University of California, San Diego (UCSD).
Alise Tifentale is a doctoral candidate in Art History at the Graduate 
Center, CUNY. Her academic research as well as curatorial and editorial 
work is focused on photography in art and popular visual culture.
Jay Chow is web developer in Katana, San Diego, CA, and researcher in 
Software Studies Initiative.

http://www.the-everyday.net

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STADTBILDER (2013)
Moritz Stefaner (Germany)

Stadtbilder presents an attempt to map the digital shape of cities. 
While traditional maps show us buildings, roads and physical 
infrastructure, these maps reveal where and in which form the city is 
alive. The maps show an overlay of all the digitally marked “hotspots” 
in a city, such as restaurant, hotels, clubs, etc. collected from online 
services like yelp and foursquare. What they don’t show are the streets, 
the railroads, the buildings. The only exception are the rivers and 
lakes, for their help in framing the information for the viewer and the 
influence they have on shaping the cities.

Moritz Stefaner works as a “Truth and Beauty Operator” on the crossroads 
of data visualization and information aesthetics. With a background in 
Cognitive Science and Interface Design, his work balances analytical and 
aesthetic aspects in mapping complex phenomena.

http://uberblic.com (The data is sourced from Uberblic)
http://stadt-bilder.com (Project website)
http://truth-and-beauty.net (Author's website)

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CINEMETRICS (2011)
Frederic Brodbeck (Germany)

Cinemetrics is a project about gathering and visualizing video data, in 
order to reveal the visual characteristics of films and to create a 
“fingerprint” for them. Information such as the editing structure, color 
and motion are extracted, analyzed and transformed into animated 
graphical representations, so that movies can be seen as a whole, and 
compared side by side. Since motion pictures are a time-based medium, 
they can only be seen one image at a time – that’s why it’s challenging 
to capture and display them in their entirety. With its graphical 
fingerprints, Cinemetrics allows you to put two or more movies next to 
each other and immediately see the similarities and / or differences, 
for instance: original vs. remake; movies of the same genre / series; 
different epochs of film-making; movies by one particular director.

Frederic Brodbeck studied graphic design in Germany and the Netherlands. 
He currently works as designer and creative coder in The Hague.

http://cinemetrics.fredericbrodbeck.de/

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ON BROADWAY (2014)
Daniel Goddemeyer (Germany/USA), Moritz Stefaner (Germany), Dominikus 
Baur (Germany), Lev Manovich (USA)

The interactive installation and web application On Broadway represents 
life in the 21st-century city through a compilation of 40 million data 
points and social media images covering the 13 miles of Broadway that 
span Manhattan. The result is a new type of city view, created from the 
activities and media shared by hundreds of thousands of people. How we 
can best represent a “data city”? We did not want to show the data in a 
conventional way as graphs and numbers. We also did not want to use 
another convention of showing spatial data – a map. The result of our 
explorations is “On Broadway”: a visually rich image-centric interface, 
where numbers play only a secondary role, and no maps are used. The 
project proposes a new visual metaphor for thinking about the city: a 
vertical stack of image and data layers. There are 13 such layers in the 
project, all aligned to locations along Broadway. Using our unique 
interface, you can see all data at once, or zoom and follow Broadway 
block by block.

Daniel Goddemeyer is a freelance visualization designer; exploring the 
cultural impacts of
ubiquitous access to information to create new products and services. 
M.A. Royal College of Art. Moritz Stefaner is an independent consultant 
in information visualization / Truth and Beauty Operator. M.A. in 
Interface Design, B.Sc. in Cognitive Science. Dominikus Baur is a data 
visualization and mobile interaction designer, Ph.D. in Media 
Informatics from the University of Munich. Lev Manovich is an expert on 
digital art and culture; Professor of Computer Science, The Graduate 
Center, CUNY; Director, Software Studies Initiative.

http://on-broadway.nyc
http://on-broadway.nyc/app

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CULTUREGRAPHY (2014)
Kim Albrecht, Boris Müller, Marian Dörk (Germany)

Culturegraphy is interactive web-tool that investigates cultural 
information exchange over time also known as 'memes'. These networks can 
provide new insights into the rich interconnections of cultural 
development. Treating cultural works as nodes and influences as directed 
edges, the visualization of these cultural networks can provide new 
insights into the rich interconnections of cultural development. The 
graphics represent complex relationships of movie references by 
combining macro views summarizing 100 years of movie influences with 
micro views providing a close-up look at the embedding of individual 
movies. The macro view shows the rise of the self-referential character 
of postmodern cinema, while the micro level illustrates differences 
between individual movies, when they were referenced and by whom. The 
visualizations provide views that are closer to the real complexity of 
the relationships than aggregated views or rankings could do.

Kim Albrecht is a visual researcher and information designer, currently 
based in Boston, working at the Center for Complex Network Research as a 
visualization researcher. Culturegraphy work is created in collaboration 
with graphic designer Boris Müller and information visualization 
researcher and designer Marian Dörk.

http://kimalbrecht.com/

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COMPUTERS WATCHING MOVIES (2013)
Benjamin Grosser (USA)

Computers Watching Movies shows what a computational system sees when it 
watches the same films that we do. The work illustrates this vision as a 
series of temporal sketches, where the sketching process is presented in 
synchronized time with the audio from the original clip. Viewers are 
provoked to ask how computer vision differs from their own human vision, 
and what that difference reveals about our culturally-developed ways of 
looking. Why do we watch what we watch when we watch it? Will a system 
without our sense of narrative or historical patterns of vision watch 
the same things?
Computers Watching Movies was computationally produced using software 
written by the artist. This software uses computer vision algorithms and 
artificial intelligence routines to give the system some degree of 
agency, allowing it to decide what it watches and what it does not. Six 
well-known clips from popular films are used in the work, enabling many 
viewers to draw upon their own visual memory of a scene when they watch 
the work. The scenes are from the following movies: 2001: A Space 
Odyssey, American Beauty, Inception, Taxi Driver, The Matrix, and Annie 
Hall.

Artist Benjamin Grosser focuses on the cultural, social, and political 
implications of software. Grosser’s recognitions include First Prize in 
VIDA 16, the Expanded Media Award for Network Culture from Stuttgarter 
Filmwinter, and a commission from Rhizome.

https://bengrosser.com/

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CHARTING CULTURE (2014)
Maximilian Schich (Germany / USA), Mauro Martino (Italy / USA)

This animation distills hundreds of years of culture into just five 
minutes. A team of historians and scientists wanted to map cultural 
mobility, so they tracked the births and deaths of notable individuals 
like David, King of Israel, and Leonardo da Vinci, from 600 BC to the 
present day. Using them as a proxy for skills and ideas, their map 
reveals intellectual hotspots and tracks how empires rise and crumble. 
The information comes from Freebase, a Google-owned database of 
well-known people and places, and other catalogues of notable 
individuals. The visualization was created by Maximilian Schich 
(University of Texas at Dallas) and Mauro Martino (IBM Research).

Mauro Martino is an Italian expert in data visualization based in 
Boston. He created and leads the Cognitive Visualization Lab at IBM 
Watson in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Maximilian Schich is an art historian and Associate Professor in Arts & 
Technology and a founding member of The Edith O'Donnell Institute of Art 
History at The University of Texas at Dallas.

http://www.mamartino.com
http://www.schich.info/

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U.S. GUN KILLINGS: THE STOLEN YEARS (2013)
Periscopic (USA)

Using data from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime 
Report, this data visualization and exploration tool visualizes the gun 
murders that took place in 2010 and 2013, the most recent years for 
which data was available.The Uniform Crime Report includes 
voluntarily-reported data from police precincts across the country, and 
represents more than 285 million U.S. inhabitants – 94.6% of the total 
population, containing details of each person who was killed, including 
their age, gender, race, relationship to killer, and more. What the 
dataset does not contain is an assessment of the potential life that was 
stolen from these individuals as a result of their murder. To calculate 
that, we used the World Health Organization’s UNSD Demographic 
Statistics, and performed an age prediction weighted according to the 
age distribution of U.S. deaths, paired with a likely cause of death at 
that age. We’ve added near real-time data for gun deaths in 2013. While 
the data isn’t from a source that is as official as the FBI, it does 
help us get an idea of the gun-related violence that happens every day. 
The 2013 data also includes suicides and gun accidents, and offers a 
more comprehensive understanding of the effect of guns in our country.

Periscopic is a socially-conscious data visualization firm that helps 
companies and organizations promote information transparency and public 
awareness.

http://www.periscopic.com

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OUT OF SIGHT, OUT OF MIND (2013)
Pitch Interactive (USA)

A web based narrative visualization documenting every drone strike 
carried out in Pakistan. Out of Sight, Out of Mind was inspired by the 
inadequacies of other attempts to report the effects of an invisible 
technological war. Using data from the Bureau of Investigative 
Journalism we visualized every known attack by the US and Coalition 
military since 2004 by date, location and number of fatalities. The 
visualization builds itself as each attack generates the timeline across 
the screen. The viewer can dig deeper by hovering or clicking in to 
reveal specific details about each attack on the horizontal timeline. 
The 'Victims' tab provides an alternate view showing the aggregated 
number of victims by month. In both views the data produces patterns 
that urge viewers to reflect on realities hidden by the numbers.

Pitch Interactive's work spans illustrations, physical installations, 
projections, console game user interfaces, software applications, 
websites and textiles. Their work has been showcased at the MoMA's 
TalkToMe exhibit in New York, the Data Flow books and many other 
exhibitions internationally acclaimed publications.

http://pitchinteractive.com

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SMART CITIZEN (2012 – present)
Smart Citizen Team

Smart Citizen is a crowd sensing project that started in 2012 to develop 
bottom-up citizen science tools under an open source philosophy, 
facilitating every citizen to learn about open data, programming, 
computer science, internet of things, and more importantly: about social 
and political change through technology, encouraging participatory 
urbanism and activism practices. The Smart Citizen project is based on 
geolocation, Internet and free hardware and software for data collection 
and sharing, and (in a second phase) the production of objects; it 
connects people with their environment and their city to create more 
effective and optimized relationships between resources, technology, 
communities, services and events in the urban environment. It is also a 
platform to generate participatory processes of the people in the 
cities. Connecting data, people and knowledge, the objective of the 
platform is to serve as a node for building productive open indicators 
and distributed tools, and thereafter the collective construction of the 
city for its own inhabitants.

Smart Citizen is an open source participatory sensing platform that 
comprises a sensor kit (SCK), an online platform and a mobile 
application. The project was launched in 2012, instigated by the Fab Lab 
Barcelona, the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC), 
Hangar art production center, Media Interactive design (MID) and Goteo 
crowd-funding platform.

https://smartcitizen.me/

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BAND 9 (2015)
Semiconductor (UK)

Band 9 is a light box installation that considers nature within the 
framework of science. Nine light boxes show scientific cloud data, which 
have been captured from space by a remote sensing satellite, orbiting 
the Earth. Using optical sensors it collects reflected light in various 
wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum. By focusing on very thin 
slices of these, scientists can pinpoint individual phenomena such as 
the band we see here, which is designed to reveal high-altitude clouds 
called Cirrus. What we see in the images is dictated by the capturing 
technology; the satellite scans in 115 mile wide swathes orbiting the 
earth from north to south and anything beyond the dedicated wavelengths 
is swallowed into a black void. The angle the light boxes are installed 
reflects the incline the data has been captured and archived at. By 
presenting the raw satellite data using techniques informed by the 
capturing technology Semiconductor are, exploring how technologies that 
are made to study nature, mediate our experiences and understanding of it.

Semiconductor is UK artist duo Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt. In their 
work they explore the material nature of our world and how we experience 
it through the lens of science and technology, questioning how they 
mediate our experiences of nature.

http://semiconductorfilms.com

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TALK TO ME. HUMAN-PLANT COMMUNICATION (2011–2015)
Rasa Smite, Raitis Smits, Martins Ratniks (Latvia)

Talk to Me is an artistic inquiry into human and plant communication, 
yet also scientists have nowadays performed various experiments in order 
to verify the old assumption that communicative with plants makes them 
grow better. RIXC artists developed a human-plant communication 
interface, by using which people were asked to send encouraging messages 
to the growing plants, who grew in different exhibition venues, and were 
"equipped" with web-cam, wi-fi and loudspeakers. We received over 13 000 
messages during the two-year period of the human-plant communication 
experiment performed in various locations in Tallinn, Basel, Riga and 
Ventspils. The outcome of this project is a book, which introduces to 
the project idea, performed experiments, and analyses the content of the 
received messages. Also an other new artworks now have been created 
including time-laps video from web-cam image archive, as well as silk 
screen prints and 3D objects mapping the most commonly used words and 
their inter-relations, whereby using data as artistic medium.

Rasa Smite and Raitis Smits are artists, curators and cultural 
innovators, working with science and emerging media technologies since 
mid-90s. They are key founders of RIXC, Riga based center for new media 
culture and artist collective, who collaborate with video artist and 
graphic designer Martins Ratniks.

http://talktome.rixc.lv
http://rixc.org

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RUN (2015)
Kristaps Epners (Latvija)

The running ritual is everyday practice by the artist. Since 2012, when 
running he is taking video camera with him. He compares the running with 
writing the diary, where words are replaced with the images and 
trajectories of the running path. The work consists of the  book, sound 
and video, interpreting the data from the  artist's running times.

Kristaps Epners is based in Latvia, he has from graduated the Latvian 
Academy of Arts, Visual Communication department. The artist mainly 
works with video, installation and photography. More recently, he 
explores how the cyclical and everyday activities interect with the time.

http://kristapsepners.com

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more info: http://rixc.org  | http://rixc.org/en/festival/DATA%20DRIFT/
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