Catalogue for the RAW DATA exhibition at Whitebox Gallery, QCA Gold Coast 6 - 23 October 2011

1. Raw
Data
6th 23rd Oct 2011

2. Published by Octavium Press, Brisbane.
ISBN: 978-1-921760-56-3
© 2011 Ashley Whamond, the artists and Queensland College of Art, Griffith
University.
Catalogue published on the event of the RAW DATA exhibition at the
Whitebox Gallery, Queensland College of Art, Griffith University 6th – 23rd
October, 2011.
Designed by Carlin Watego.
building G14, level one
queensland college of art
griffith university parklands drive
gold coast qld 4222
www.whiteboxgallery.com

3. RAw Data
Exhibition Curated by Ashley Whamond
Featured Artists
Di Ball
Daniel Della-Bosca
Matt Ditton
Kylie Hicks
Alan Hill
Kelly Hussey-Smith
Simone Paterson
Jason Nelson

4. Raw Data
Information Today
Wikipedia has already changed the world, and with your continued support there’s no telling
how much we can do for people internationally. Imagine a world in which every single person
on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. – Jimmy Wales[1]
Jimmy Wales’ initial ambition for Wikipedia to become an information database to rival
Encyclopaedia Britannica is presented on the site as a service to humanity, a free body of
knowledge available to anybody with internet access. However, like most idealistic humanitarian
ambitions for the internet, they are quickly corrupted by the complications of the real world.
The discussion pages of Wikipedia represent a fascinating archive of narrow-minded argument,
unjustified bravado and insults that would be at home in any real-world school playground. The
result is what Wikipedia hails as one of it major successes and what critics cite as its biggest
problem: consensus.[2] Wikipedia entries are argued over, and bickered about by experts and
amateurs alike until a consensus is reached, Wikipedia is happy because a result has been
achieved whereas the critics’ point is proven that consensus lacks criticality. So Wales is right
when he states, in the pitch for donations quoted above, that Wikipedia has changed the world.
It has changed the world because it has changed our relationship with information. Though not
single-handedly of course – the development of the Internet itself probably represented the
biggest shift in the way we understand, use and talk about information. Wikipedia is simply the
obvious manifestation of these understandings, uses and discussions.
The historical moment we find ourselves in has, since the late seventies, been characterised as
the ‘information age’.[3] But what exactly does this term mean, and what are its characteristics?
Wikipedia posits the development of the Internet as a major contributing factor to this
characterisation. And it is true that the Internet has indeed lubricated the flow of information but
the idea that information is something that could actually flow between different geographical
locations and material bases predates the internet and even the modern computer by decades.
In 1928 electronics researcher Ralph Hartley[4] wrote a paper entitled “The Transmission of
Information” in which he discussed information as a measureable entity[5] in which case
information can be understood as something separate and independent of the medium delivering
it. And indeed, this idea characterises not only the contemporary understanding of information
but also the qualitative character of digital technology evident in common descriptive binaries
such “real” and “virtual”.

5. The concept of data is crucial to this separation. Data as defined by Wikipedia is “the lowest
level of abstraction from which information and then knowledge are derived”.[6] Unabstracted
or unprocessed data is referred to as “raw data”. The Wikipedia entry for “raw data” defines
it as data drawn from a particular source that has yet to be processed or organised into a
representational system through which meaningful information could be communicated.[7] Data
then, whether it is digital or not, is essentially virtual by its very nature as an abstraction of the
real. Ironically then, knowledge would appear to be the result of a series of abstractions from the
original object. It is therefore only possible to know something if it is presented to us in a virtual
form that is wholly different from its original state.
The processing, or virtualisation of raw data through abstractions to produce new information is
an arbitrary process as there are myriad options as to how this processing takes place, exposing
it to manipulation. The Wikipedia entry for “raw data” also cites “the inventor of the Internet,”
Tim Berners-Lee and his appeal that more raw data should be made available to the public so
that we might at least be given the opportunity to interpret the data for ourselves.[8] Of course,
the information presented in this entry, and in fact all other entries that make up Wikipedia, is
precisely one such arbitrary interpretation of data, which, in this case, is indicated by the alert at
the top of the page stating that the information in this particular entry is not completely reliable
because it “does not cite any references or sources”.[9] This entry, we can assume, has not yet
been through the process that would bring it up (or down) to the standards of consensus desired
by Wikipedia. It is surprisingly only very short and despite the suggestion in the alert to “please
help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources”, it has not been developed in any
meaningful sense since the alert was posted in 2009.
However, had I checked the “raw data” entry between 2:37pm and 4:24pm on 30th October 2008
I would have learnt that: “Raw data is a term for taking it up the bum by a giraffe, it is also known
as primary data.”[10] Or even more recently, on 11th September at 5:37pm I would have discovered
that raw data was in fact “a term for ‘big penis’”[11]. The latter was flagged as “possible
vandalism” and removed immediately. It is not difficult to understand the attractiveness that this
kind of digital vandalism holds for those with little else to do. Of course, the Dada artists of the
early 20th Century, made similar assaults on the venerated domains of information of the day,
namely high art and journalistic language, though defacement and nonsense poetry. However
as much as I would like to read political motivation into the vandalism of Wikipedia I am sure
it is more a symptom of Wikipedia’s user-generated content platform, a characteristic of what
has become known as Web 2.0.[12] It also demonstrates that information today, is not only an
arbitrary twist on some original raw data but in fact is also subject to temporal manipulations.
That is to say that the immediacy of our current accessibility to information databases like
Wikipedia coupled with the immediacy and accessibility of editing that it provides means that at
any single moment when we access information, we may be viewing a wholly different version of
that information than what we would see a few seconds later. It is this sense of the infinite update
that characterises “the information age” not simply the fact that information flows more freely

6. and to more places – not only is information not fixed in time or space, its central meaning has also
adopted this fluid character.
In an age defined by such fluidity the default state of being is ‘the update’, a continuous cultural
moment of 2.0 versioning. The accelerating cycle of constant renewal can be seen across all aspects
of life including, obviously fashion and consumer goods, but also politics (sudden leadership
changes and coups), civil infrastructure (property demolition and development), medical technology
(advanced prosthesis), genetics (genetically modified crops) etc. These different manifestations of
‘update culture’ have the potential for positive or negative impacts on everyday life but the diversity
of examples demonstrates the impact a society’s informational character on its cultural behaviours.
Art has a unique place in this cultural context as it is both indifferent to the update and is less
concerned with information and more concerned with experience, that is, focussed on raw data
rather than its abstraction.
In the 21st Century it is difficult to utter the word ‘data’ without calling to mind computational
language and digital or electronic information. However data was something very powerful long
before it became mediated digitally. The Dadaists, for example, felt disenfranchised about language,
as the information it delivered was untruthful and manipulative. As a result they abandoned all
language that could be said to be logically linked to any data at all. That is, of course, except for
the link to direct experience. In his performances at the Cabaret Voltaire (the Dada headquarters
in Zurich) Hugo Ball used absurd, nonsense language in his poems and delivered them with such a
physical intensity that the language became almost indexical to the raw data of the performance
experience – raw data and information become one and the same.
The artists who have been brought together in the Raw Data exhibition have been selected from a
diversity of practice fields to respond to the concept of “raw data” with the intention that in their
responses they will also be creating new sets of raw data rather than informational abstractions.
Even if the artist takes existing sets of data as his/her starting point in the way that Matt Ditton
and Jason Nelson have, they are never simply informational patterns that are designed to
facilitate the conversion of data into knowledge. Art brings something new to the data set that is
beyond verbal or numeric explanation, it utilises the dimension of experience that is closer to the
engagement with raw data than it is to the acquisition of information. For example, for Kylie Hicks,
Kelly Hussey-Smith, Alan Hill and Simone Paterson raw data relates to direct human experiences
with the world. Whether this involves human relationships, our relationship with animals or the
perceptual apprehension of consumer society or domestic space, these are experiences that defy
the regular informational patterns of words and numbers. Daniel Della-Bosca’s process however
is highly dependent on the manipulation of complex mathematical and computational data but
this is coupled with a consideration for the haptic data yielded by sensorial experience. Di Ball’s
relationship with data is a complex one. At the 2008 International Symposium on Electronic Arts
(ISEA) she witnessed new media theorist, Lev Manovich speak on the contemporary phenomenon of

7. ‘data mining’. But at this symposium Di presented her own paper to the congregation of “geeks”
in attendance lamenting that she had lost of her own ‘geek girl’ status. Di has recently been at the
2011 ISEA attempting to get her geek back, she is blogging the journey for the show.
Di’s choice of social media as a method of documentation is both convenient and appropriate in
an exhibition concerned with the relationship between information and direct experience. Social
media has become an accurate index of this relationship, much of the debate surrounding social
media remains fixed to the aging argument that the virtual is replacing the real: virtual ‘friends’
replacing real ones; text based ‘conversations’ replacing verbal communication etc. As long as we
think of these different experiences as binary opposites the arguments pitting one experience
against another on the grounds of their relative proximity to something called reality, will not go
away.
In recent weeks Facebook has announced that it is launching a new feature called the “timeline”.
It has been met with initial controversy, as are most Facebook developments, in light of concerns
over user privacy, which essentially means over what users fear about how their personal
“information” will be treated. Facebook’s defence is that it is not extracting any necessarily
new information about the user but in fact, the Timeline is actually just a new informational
representation of what data is already present in the user’s profile. With social media and other
Web 2.0 user-generated media, what we often forget is that as much as the data we fill out these
media with is our own, the platform that structures the informational pattern is not. By the time
this exhibition is over, Facebook’s Timeline will be old news and likely commonplace to its users
to the extent that it will be almost ready to be defended in the face of the next interface update.
While it may occasionally engage in acts of subversion art is not in the business of competing
with social media on any level, however art is an essential disturbance to the ‘update culture’ that
social media exemplifies. For most artists, experience itself is the raw data from which the work
of art emerges but unlike an informational pattern it is not processed or abstracted into a more
‘readable’ form, its method of communication remains in the realm of experience.
Ashley Whamond, 2011.
[1] Jimmy Wales, “Fundraising 2007/Video with Jimmy subtitles” Wikimedia Meta-Wiki http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2007/Video_with
Jimmy_subtitles (accessed Sept 20, 2011)
[2] Wikipedia contributors, “Wikipedia” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia (accessed Sept 20, 2011)
[3] Wikipedia contributors, “Information Age” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Age (accessed Sept 20, 2011)
[4] Wikipedia contributors, “Ralph Hartley” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Hartley (accessed Sept 20, 2011)
[5] Wikipedia contributors, “Information Age” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Age (accessed Sept 20, 2011)
[6] Wikipedia contributors, “Data” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data (accessed Sept 20, 2011)
[7] Wikipedia contributors, “Raw data” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raw_data (accessed Sept 20, 2011)
[8] ibid.
[9] ibid.
[10] Wikipedia contributors, “Revision History of Raw data” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Raw_data&diff
450429106&oldid=248637997 (accessed Sept 20, 2011)
[11] Wikipedia contributors, “Revision History of Raw data” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Raw_data&diff=
449855300&oldid=449855287 (accessed Sept 20, 2011)
[12] Wikipedia contributors, “Raw data” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0 (accessed Sept 20, 2011)

9. Left:
Di Ball, Beauty and the Geeks, 2011
Bottom:
Daniel Della-Bosca, Quattatube, 2011

10. Above:
Matt Ditton, Seven Months of Tokyo, 2011
Right:
Kelly Hussey-Smith, Rokiah: 30 years, 279 days, 2011

12. Above:
Alan Hill, Branded Space, 2011
Right:
Kylie Hicks, Residential Residue, 2011

15. Left:
Simone Patterson, It’s in the Bag and the Box, 2011
Bottom:
Jason Nelson, Eupotamic Showers, 2011