Digital Realism: Visualising the social through digital art practice

数字艺术家如何使用我们每天产生的海量数字数据(大数据)来讲述关于我们自己和我们生活的故事？在一个公众关切的问题越来越多地被框定、反映和表现为数据交换和流通(例如通过Twitter和Facebook)的时代，我们被告知，大数据技术有望从根本上改变我们表示和理解人类行为的能力。这些方法提供了截然不同的新方法，通过分析我们如何与互联网的数字服务互动，以及通过我们在这一过程中留下的数据痕迹来捕捉我们的所作所为。倡导者认为，如果有足够的计算能力，这些数据集中揭示的模式有可能揭示我们一些最紧迫的社会、经济、政治和环境问题的解决方案。这项研究表明，正如摄影和电影产生的纪录片形式历史上一直试图利用技术来讲述我们的人类生活故事一样，大数据技术可能会提供独特的新方式来表现我们，通过它们捕捉我们在日常活动中产生的数据。我们将以可视化、动画、大规模静态图像和源自社会数据集的数字3D模型的形式制作原型艺术品。目前的大数据方法侧重于如何在商业环境中使用大数据，例如通过使用来自社交媒体的数据来更有效地瞄准客户。科学研究中的类似方法是在科学数据中寻找相关性，以更好地理解自然系统中的相互作用。然而，这个拟议的项目将代表在大数据中发现的人类活动模式，以讲述我们相信什么、我们做什么以及我们是谁的故事。可视化是实现这一点的一种有效方法，因为它们将抽象的、难以理解的信息转化为图像形式，使数据变得可理解。随着我们周围的世界以及我们在其中的活动越来越多地被我们留下的数据痕迹所标记，这个项目提出的那种探索性工作存在着迫切的需求。具体地说，研究希望找到方法，让人们注意到规范的大数据方法中被忽视的社会方面。从创造性的角度来看，有机会突出大数据的解释性，反思其报道中缺失的内容，并找到描述这些缺失的方法。Research将威斯敏斯特大学在可视化和数字艺术实践方面拥有专业知识的数字艺术研究人员与牛津大学牛津互联网研究所的社会地理学家联合起来，他们的研究涉及某些群体和社区如何被排除在数字数据集之外。一个项目网站将记录研究并作为一个平台，发布项目期间产生的艺术品，这些作品将免费向公众开放。同样，所有计算机代码和尽可能多的数据集都将向公众和更广泛的研究界公布。在项目结束时，将举行一次免费会议，向公众开放，包括学者、数字艺术家和设计师以及其他专家，讨论研究的后果和好处，并讨论推进工作的方法。

How can digital artists use the vast amounts of digital data we produce on a daily basis ('big data') to tell stories about ourselves and our lives? In an era when public issues of concern are increasingly framed, mirrored and played out as exchanges and circulations of data (e.g. via Twitter and Facebook), we are told that big data technologies promise fundamental changes in our ability to represent and understand human behaviour. These approaches offer distinctively new ways of capturing what we do through analysis of how we interact with the Internet's digital services and through the data traces we leave behind us in this process. Given enough computing power, argue advocates, the patterns revealed in these datasets have the potential to reveal solutions to some of our most pressing social, economic, political, and environmental issues. This research suggests that just as documentary forms arising from photography and film have historically sought to use technology to tell stories about our human lives, big data technologies may offer distinctively new ways to represent us through the ways they capture the data we produce through our everyday activities. We will produce prototype artworks in the form of visualisations, animations, large-scale static images and digital 3D models derived from social data sets. Current approaches in big data, focus on how it can be employed in a commercial setting by using data derived from social media for example, to target customers more effectively. Similar approaches in science research seek correlations in scientific data to better understand interactions in natural systems. However this proposed project will represent the patterns of human activity discovered in big data to tell stories about what we believe in, what we do and who we are. Visualisations are an effective way of doing this as they take abstract and difficult to understand information and turn it into image forms that make data comprehensible. As the world around us, and our activity within it, is increasingly marked by the data traces we leave behind, there exists a pressing need for the kinds of exploratory work this project proposes. Specifically research looks to find ways of bringing to attention aspects of the social overlooked in normative big data approaches. From a creative perspective there is scope to foreground the interpretive nature of big data, reflect upon what is missing in its coverage and find ways of depicting these absences. Research unites digital arts researchers from the University of Westminster with expertise in visualisation and digital arts practice with social geographers from the Oxford Internet Institute, Oxford University, whose research is concerned with how certain groups and communities are excluded from digital data sets.A project website will document research and act as a platform to publish artworks produced during the project which will be made freely available to the public. Similarly all computer code and wherever possible data sets will be released to the public and wider research community. A free conference open to the public that includes academics, digital artists and designers and other specialists will be held at project end to debate the consequences and benefits of research and discuss ways of taking work forward.