Data | Art

Curated by James O’Sullivan

Data|Art invites audiences to engage with data as expression. Digital art is increasingly associated with large, multimedia productions, or jarring, combinatory mashups and satirization. The place of techné, the patient and intentional craftwork that realises all a form can be, is being effaced by desires to keep pace with the exponential rate at which media technologies evolve, or turn such technologies back on themselves through hacktivist ideologies and intentionally perverse aesthetics. There seems to be little room for art which is inherently digital and radical, but also represents a commitment to craft, to mastering computers and screens as artistic instruments, and appealing to the sentiments of its public. Data|Art will showcase three works of Irish digital art which do just that, taking simple and complex datasets from a world drowning in data, producing acts of expression which use the digital to engage with, but also problematise, this precarious age of machines.