Stanza

Year
2017

Medium / Material / Technic
Data visualization (excerpt 30 sec.), color

The Global Dérive: »The Sum is Greater Than the Parts« is a piece of software that allows participants to be tracked and visualized, thus becoming part of the artwork. The program allows anywhere between ten and 1,000 or more people to participate together and help co-create an artwork that engages in real time with issues of data ownership and information privacy in the city.

Performance participants become members of The Binary Graffiti Club by wearing a hoodie inscribed with either zeros or ones. They are then tracked through the cityscape as a group entity, and the collected data is used to visualize them on large screens in real time. Every participant is by default an active contributor to the work and helps in its creation as a whole.

In keeping with Stanza’s own wider artistic concerns and those of the exhibition – to engage with the city as a digitally and physically connected system, and with its relationship to our notions of identity – the data patterns reveal new ways of seeing the world.