Julie Freeman
We Need Us (Notes from Nature)
»We Need Us« is a real-time online animated artwork that explores big data and translates it into an environment of animated forms. The piece concentrates on metadata from the activity on Zooniverse.org, the world’s largest and most popular platform for people-powered research, which enables volunteers to help classify large scientific datasets.
The initial input for the piece is a translation of metadata from fifteen Zooniverse projects. Five of them are presented at the Seasons of Media Arts: Galaxy Zoo, Gravity Spy, Hunt for Galaxy Clusters, Monkey Health Explorer, and Planet Four: Ridges. Analyzing and transforming the information input from around 80,000 participants, the work aims to answer the question: Can we experience data beyond its content?
The accuracy, complexity, and availability of data sets are growing every day, together with their importance. We Need Us takes its point of departure from the ever-increasing complexities of data, and seeks to understand it better through its own properties. Julie Freeman explores the distinct, living qualities and particular characteristics of information, such as growth, velocity, and fragility. Thus, this non-content driven analysis and display of information is quite the opposite of known forms of data visualization.
The work was co-commissioned by The Space and the Open Data Institute.