data exhibition
REFERENCE
Blas, Z. (2019) Available at: Queer technologies（Accessed: 21/02/2020)
Domestic Data Streamers (2019) Available at: https://domesticstreamers.com/projects/（Accessed: 20/02/2020)
reflection
I researched four projects on data, which are Queer Technology, Lifeline, Cocoa and Universal. Through the research of these projects, I learned more about the possibility of data visualization. And know how an exhibition should be arranged, how team members should work together. This is very useful for our next step.
In Queer Technology, I learned that they divided the team members into Graphic Design, 3D Modeling and Photography, and each member performed his own duties, which made the working ideas clearer and the working more efficient.
In Lifeline, I learned how to express the data flow in three-dimensional form. They make good use of space, use balloons to interact with people, and use these balloons to form information grids. We have done some 3D experiments in the 3D workshop. If we want to present a set of data in 3D form, we need to consider the carrier of the data and how to interact with the audience.
The Universal exhibition shows us a participatory experience and encompassing sound and light design. It can arouse The audience's various senses, stimulate The audience from various aspects, let the audience be the main characters. Designers use this approach to explain local medical conditions. It's also an immersive experience that allows viewers to see the data more clearly.
The Sense of Cocoa made me feel most amazed. Using data, technology and emotion, the designers have achieved a cross-boundary collaboration that allows patients with taste disorders to experience the taste of chocolate at its highest level. Each patient is also given a personalized watercolor map to represent their clinical diagnosis. Such data is unique and beautiful, which breaks my conventional understanding of data vision. I had no idea it could tell such a beautiful story.
Queer Technologies is an organization that produces critical applications, tools, and situations for queer technological agency, interventions, and sociality. By re-imaging a technology designed for queer use, Queer Technologies critiques the heteronormative, capitalist, militarized underpinnings of technological architectures, design, and functionality. Queer Technologies includes, transCoder, a queer programming anti-language; ENgenderingGenderChangers, a “solution” to Gender Adapters’ male / female binary; Gay Bombs, a technical manual manifesto that outlines a “how to” of queer networked activism; and GRID, a mapping application that tracks QT dissemination and infection.
Queer Technologies’ products are often displayed and deployed at the Disingenuous Bar, an attack on Appleʼs Genius Bar that offers a heterotopic space for political support for “technical” problems. Queer Technologies also delivers live demonstrations and produces video tutorials.
Transforming a database into an info-experience
The installation is made up of a grid of 800 balloons which mark the point between one’s real age and the age at which they would like to die, contrasting the information with their gender. The coordinates where no one wants to die are represented in white, whereas the ones that represent death are in black. A volatile and ephemeral piece that questions our desire to live and an irrefutable end of a journey, or in other words, a lifeline.
The building of the database
Dysgeusia is a word used to describe the distortions affecting the sense of taste. About 17% of the population suffers from it – including cancer patients going through chemotherapy.
Dysgeusia makes the food taste differently: some times metallic, some times acid, and some times with no flavour at all. Since dysgeusia has no other effect besides compromising the sense of taste, it hardly gets any attention. Domestic Data Streamers use data, technology, and emotions to make 7 patients suffering from dysgeusia recover the ability to taste chocolate. They created a personalized path for each person that combined stimuli especially prepared to evoke sensorial capabilities. Patients would enter an individual cabin in which sensorial visual projections, musical pitches, and storytelling were used to raise their reception sensors to the top. With their senses at the maximum level, they tasted a pastry made by the chef.
In order to make this data visible, they prepared an editorial booklet of the experience. They crafted watercolour maps for each patient, to visualize the relation between clinical diagnostics – the level of sensorial abilities of each patient – and emotional background – their individual memories related to cocoa, to help understand how they all create their own sense of chocolate, and how it’s different for each and every one of them. The booklet also includes the original recipe created by Jordi Roca especially for them.
An exhibition to show how the most important part of a universal healthcare system is each and every individual that makes it possible.
Participatory experiences and encompassing sound and light design
The exhibition was designed to keep a fine balance between information and interaction; Domestic Data Streamers transformed raw data into relatable numbers that could clearly explain the situation of health, treatments and hospitals, but they also allowed people to experience the sounds of a rescue helicopter flight.