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Information Design: Data Is Political
This two-week course will explore concepts and methods for visualizing and making sense of vast archives of digital information. We will use short design exercises to respond to specific issues that arise through an exploration of online data sources. Hands-on design exercises and experiments will be framed and examined by critical reflection and discussions.
This course is being taught in conjunction with Data Is Political: On Art, Design and Information Politics, a symposium examining the relationship between art, design, and the politics of information. The event brings together speakers from design, art, theory, and information sciences to discuss such questions as: What are the aesthetic, ethical and spatial dimensions of information and its relation to power, the production of knowledge, and construction of urban spaces? Speakers include Gediminas & Nomeda Urbonas, Daniel van der Velden, Philippe Rekacewicz, and Jessica Rylan with contributions from Steve Dixon, Jill Walker Rettberg among other artists and practitioners from the Bergen community.
In the first week, students will research and discuss the works of the conference participants in preparation for the symposium on Thursday. On Friday we will have a workshop with conference guests. The resulting work will be developed over the next week and will be critiqued and discussed on the final day.
The following is a description of the concept for the symposium.
Data Is Political
Radical increases in computing power and speed together with the rhetoric of openness and organizational transparency have led to a desire to read, visualize and make sense of vast and expanding archives of digital information from financial data and government documents to global sporting events and personal video collections. Corporations storing unprecedented archives of data on their servers have called on artists and designer to lead efforts to visualize this information, producing new opportunities for designers to use their skills on problems of seductive complexity. Often such initiatives are framed as promoting the public good. But the act of storing, structuring, manipulating, visualizing and distributing can both reveal and conceal the underlying structures and global networks to which the data refers. Far from value neutral, the act of visualizing information occurs within a complex and contentious field of competing agendas. Simply put, data is political.
Over the past fifty years, artists and designers have developed tactics that explore, remix and interrogate cultural archives as products of carefully constructed, state controlled systems of knowledge. Artists and politicians understand the value of these knowledge productions and use them as opportunities to challenge the organization of-- the rules of access to-- and methods of distribution of this cultural data. This symposium will bring together artists, designers, engineers and political scientists who have developed critical practices related to information and the politics that they produce. The symposium asks: How does the scale of expanding databases affect the creative practices of artists and designers working within public or private sectors? What strategies do designers and artists use to negotiate the competing aims of agencies with a stake in the information that is represented?
Arbeidsform:
Krav til forkunnskaper:
Kurset starter 12.03.2012 / Uke 11, og varer til 23.03.2012 / Uke 12
Sted: sted
Tilbyder: Viskom
Målgruppe: Møbel
Viskom
Ã…rstrinn: Bachelor 2
Antall plasser: 12
Faglig stab: