The exhibition Unreal Data focuses on how the shift to a data-driven society has necessitated that all the technologies we use essentially become part of the networked surveillance infrastructure. Automated data collection has become an intrinsic component of most technologies. Within this new and still emerging setting, we look at Unreal Data as a means to strategically intervene into data-driven systems. Unreal Data uses the ambiguous quality of data as an opportunity not to describe the world but to strategically producing data to provoke a specific outcome. Thus, Unreal Data is data that has been deliberately created or modified not to conform to the world, but to transform it – the lack of representational quality is not a bug, but a feature. We believe it is exactly this feature which opens spaces for action in a data-driven society where opting out is no longer an option.
In a post-surveillance world where tracking is ubiquitous and opting out is no longer an option, unreal-ing data is a way to playfully interact with algorithmic regimes and to regain some agency and control. The works in the exhibition find ways of doing this.
Photo: Tanja Kanazir
Artists
Lauren Lee McCarthy, Jeremy Bailey, Adam Harvey, Tega Brain & Surya Mattu, Simon Weckert, Iodine Dynamics, Mario Santamaría, Telecommuters Working Group
