Newsletter #28 / October 18th
Isabel Hood x FORA / squared [Data Capture: 25th - 31st May 2022]
Please join us at 6pm, Thursday October 27th, for the launch of the tenth installation in the FORA / squared series. View the work in the window at 75 Vulture St, and then accompany the artist to The End for drinks and dancing.
This month we are delighted to have digital artist and designer Isabel Hood exhibiting excerpts from her work, Data Capture: 25th - 31st May 2022.
Isabel Hood is a digital artist and designer living and working in Meanjin/Brisbane. Her practice explores alternative approaches to data collection and display, to ultimately question ideas of data ownership, vulnerability, and the frequent decontextualisation of data in the process of its collection and visualisation.
Where traditional displays of data focus on efficient analysis and presentation, Hood's work emphasises a slower engagement with information and atypical reporting metrics. While Hood’s process of collection and display is subjective and defies the typical legibility tools of data visualisation, its speculative design nature recognises ideas of data re-ownership and emphasises the already inherent biased and flawed existence of current data collection and presentation processes.
Hood highlights data's imperfect abstraction of real world information and intends to reincorporate empathy and communicate the 'affect' at different levels of the data handling. Her visualisation of the information in an atmospheric and textural space, encourages an embodied mode of data display. [words: Isabel Hood]
Below, find Hood’s curated list of research highlights, as well as words from both the artist and FORA on the upcoming show.
Further documentation of Hood’s practice can be found here and here
[Isabel Hood, iso spaces, 2020-2021]
FROM FORA
Data Capture: 25th – 31st May 2022
To view Data Capture: 25th- 31st May 2022 is to read an open diary ensconced in rice paper. Isabel Hood’s vessels, represented here via hung digital prints and plinthed 3D manifestations, are the result of a week’s worth of self-directed surveys, seven days in which the artist checked in with her emotions, and reported back. Playing with ideas of the distribution of personal, ‘less-validated’ data, the excerpts of the exercise included in this installation showcase a highly subjective, emotion-led approach to art marking that shrouds itself in a protective shield of its own making.
As a time-based project, we are given no hint as to the significance of this particular week in Hood’s life. Late May, the last days before winter, the concrete nature of the dates giving us nothing more than the transient, shifting nothingness that is the mildness of Queensland autumn.
This is not evidence-based (I have no data to back it up), but there is a certain inner-eye roll that seems prevalent amongst most people when they are presented with a survey. They are associated with government data, company feedback, the fraught healthcare system. Friends and acquaintances will post long, wheedling introductions to preface their Survey Monkey links; they desperately need twenty-five people for their graduate project, they would be lucky to get five. The most active survey system I have ever seen is ratemyprofessor.com, a cacophonous place seething with vicious delight. When do we ever take pleasure in surveys that come without some sort of personal vindication of the jerk at the front of the class? And what sort of person would willingly subject themselves to a five-times-daily numerical interrogation of their emotional wellbeing during an otherwise unremarkable Gemini-an week? We cannot wrangle much about Hood from these vessels, but her chosen processes, rather than the ultimate creations, speak more to a figuring out of her character.
Visually, we are presented with dense (matter/volume/concept) vessels, the final form of this collected data. They are compact, appear almost sandblasted, and, in printed form, are heavily flattened against the back plane. They appear squat, impenetrable, how will we ever know what emotion Hood has, literally, poured into their form? We are also denied access to the top of the vessel— we do not, and will never, know whether it has been permanently sealed. This emotion-led project gives away little in its presentation of information.
Photogrammetric and flatbed scans of Hood’s mise-en-scene while she underwent her timetabled emotional tracking provide physical context to the vessels, and also do some work in pushing Hood’s engagement with embodiment all the way. Isolated from in situ documentation, the vessels are compressions of emotional data— prop dressed with what Hood was looking at at the time, they become manifestations of Hood herself, manufactured figurines of her emotions overtaking her. Self-portraits as feelings only, the body removed and replaced by the body-based curvature of a vase.
Hood’s foregrounding of obtusely exhibited personal data presents an avenue for pondering large scale data collection. We know, to the point of fatigue, that data is collected from us constantly. Some data we will never see again; other data will be quickly regurgitated and re-presented to us as deft advertising; other data again will be muddied by the masses, the final statistics broadcast as figures you see no hint of yourself in. Data collection is often seen as non-consensual, incidental— a dodgy end of the bargain that we ‘must’ accept for living in the modern world. Hood’s seizing of this tool, her conscious self-impalement on the spike of the information highway, and her designer’s eye for imagistic representation of otherwise text-oriented information, eventuate in hazy works that, at the end of the day, only the self-portraitist herself will fully understand.
[words: Eva Phillips]
FROM I.HOOD
Data Capture: 25th — 31st May 2022 explores themes of data humanism and the distribution of private, personal and 'less-validated’ data information. During the month of May 2022, Isabel spent a week collecting personal data; recorded five times a day (9AM, 12PM, 3PM, 6PM and 9PM). The data collection process involved documenting her moods and rating how she felt on a scale of 1 — 10. Hood’s surroundings, at the time of each recording, were also documented. The extra visual capturings involved photogrammetric and flatbed scans, as well as photographs of surrounding flora and objects. All of this collected information was then translated into 3D data vessels, either as a print and/or carved into a physical form. The extra imagery either surrounds or is embedded within vessels, encouraging extra insight and context to the data displays.
For the FORA window display, a selection of this data and imagery is presented.
PRACTICE JOURNAL
Giorgia Lupi’s Data Humanism, The Revolution will be Visualized (2017)
David Hockney’s computer drawings (Untitled, 521 2009, shown here)
Claudia Hart’s Digital Combines (2021-onwards)
Bob Bicknell-Knight’s Non-Player Character exhibition (Kassel, 2022)
Shown here: Why Buy Tomorrow What You Can Buy Today, 2022 (ink and acrylic on canvas, plywood, 3D printed marble PLA plastic)
Natalia Triantafylli Animal Vases, 2022 (stoneware, 3D printed PLA)
Bubbles, Lines and String: How Information Visualisation Shapes Society (Peter Hall, 2011)
Love,
Isabel
See you on the 27th !
What FORA wants
The FORA newsletter seeks to bring forward the intertextuality that we reside in, and the inextricable ways in which art and life are linked. That is an obvious point, but one that must be constantly remarked upon, as it is one we are constantly surprised by. To be reminded of these circles is to be drawn back into the fold, equipped with the tools of thinking critically and acting compassionately.
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pps/FORA is developed on the unceded land of the Jagera and Turrbal peoples