Data & Dragons

by Addie Wagenknecht 2012

1 – What is it?

 Description by the author

“Data & Dragons Level 1-3” is an evolving sculpture project which has already been shown in several art shows around the world. The first time the sculpture has taken shape was in Austria, in 2013. At the moment, the workpiece is composed by three installation: the first two under the name “Kilohydra: A Love Letter to Chelsea and xxxx.xxx” and the third is “Cloud Farming”. Each of them dialogue with data collected from the internet, but in different ways.

Data and Dragons: Kilohydra, 2014, custom designed PCB boards, Ethernet patch cables, 80/20 aluminum installation: 75 x 23.75 x 20 in / 190.5 x 60.3 x 50.8 cm, Photo by John Berens for bitforms gallery, New York City, United States

xxxx.xxx, 2014, custom designed printed circuit boards, Ethernet patch cables, 80/20 aluminum, 80 cm x 450 cm, Photo courtesy bitforms gallery, New York

Kalohydra, as we can see from the picture, resembles a series of servers but, more precisely, is a series of custom printed circuit boards that intercept and log data from its surrounding. Connected by Ethernet cables, Kilohydra anthropomorphizes a server room, a eulogy to a time where the online experience was anonymous and unknown. Information is processed but the sculpture never shares its findings.

Data and Dragons: Cloud Farming, 2014 custom designed printed circuit boards, Ethernet patch cables, 80/20 aluminum installation: 31 x 87 x 35 in / 78.7 x 221 x 88.9 cm, Photo by John Berens for bitforms gallery, New York City, United States

Cloud Farming questions the sacred nature of technology by re-contextualizing system hierarchy as a portrait of data. It manifests the cloud, social networks, data, leaks and what forms social capital into a single object. Ultimately it’s a creative experiment about contemporary power structures as a type of group consciousness, becoming a 3-dimensional map of post-Wikileaks information culture.

About the artists

The body of work from Addie Wagenknecht is very rich and includes paintings, printings, sculptures and performances. To see her works visit her site. Addie Wagenknecht is an American artist based in Austria. Her work deals with pop culture, feminist theory, new media open source software and hardware. It explores the tension between expression and technology. She seeks to blend conceptual work with traditional forms of hacking and sculpture. Wagenknecht’s work employs a peculiar blend of hacking and visual aesthetics drenched by conceptualism. Wagenknecht is a member of Free Art & Technology (F.A.T.) Lab, Taco Bell Drawing Club and is the Chair of the Open Hardware Summit at MIT. Wagenknecht also co-produced the open source laser cutter Lasersaur. Most recently she founded Deep Lab under a Warhol Foundation Grant. She also serves on the board for the Open Source Hardware Association.

Similar workpieces

Database, Tobias Zimmer, 2014

The art project »Database« is a public installation on the subject of surveillance. It covers the invisible and unnoticed collection of data in both public as well as digital spaces and discusses the use of said information. The installation consists of a continuous printer, a paper shredder and two cameras, which detect the faces of people passing by. The faces are being printed together with a respective data entry that indicates date, time and number of the capture. They are then going to be processed by the shredder, while the digital image files are deleted immediately upon printing. This way the »Database« is gradually filling itself with huge amounts of paper and data.

 2 – What it means

As data passes through the sculpture, small green lights blink, obscured by Ethernet cables that dangle from the panels. These interventions point to the transition to an information society just as the awareness of digital forms of surveillance has burst into the mainstream. These artworks are a set of interactive “data portraits” mimicking what might be called server aesthetics. In particular xxxx.xxx makes reference to an existence where intrusion and unwanted data collection are constantly occurring.

“The series is about how society is becoming a product of the network. I wanted to create a notion of the digital body. The work is a system which breathes. Concepts of the figure and portraiture are changing with the new forms of media which lend themselves to an impulsive, constant output of expression, collaboration and history. xxxx.xxx visually emulates server rooms and forms visual nests which mimic textiles and tapestries. At the same time, it becomes about how phones and technology are becoming anthropomorphic, extensions of our arms, altering the methodologies of expression. Like a “black box” of social currency, we depend on these devices to be seen, to interact and exist, both offline and on.”

They address both to the physical, the body of the server, and the social world, the interaction it has. As centralized systems like Facebook or Twitter are coercing people into a state of being that is seen as interactive and public even though it’s illusive, the art pieces work in the same way: they seems to be active, but they don’t really produce any result. We check our social network feeds as a way to validate ourselves. There is a notion of collective intelligence and, at the same time, there is fear in that. As we look at our screens, they look at us. It is a dialogue, even if it’s asymmetrical and these works are critical of this relationship.

3 – What it could mean

The title of this artwork might come from two sources: -Dragon Data: was a Welsh producer of home computers during the early 1980s -Dungeons & Dragons: the fantasy role playboard.

As the artist stated, the workpiece deals with the digital world around us. It explores it from a communication point of view, the server collects data from the what is around but it doesn’t share it and no one can access them. It feels like this is a smart opposition to the omnipresence of data collected everyday, most of them are useless or relatively significant because they are accessible anytime, anywhere. What makes special the data collected from this server is that they’re secret as our identity should totally or, at least, partially be on the net. And this is the other speculation the artist does over her works.

The Ethernet wires are extremely long and fall down the floor in a decadent, disorder way, but still harmonious. The choice of black, instead of grey, has a strong meaning and suggest a dark matter, which enhance the mystery around this art piece and the data it collects.

It is a portrait of the future. Technologies will be self-referenced and will acquire information no matter what and mankind can’t access them. Or maybe, it is a wish for more privacy for web users, a secret hope that aims to create a safe place to maintain our personal data. This artwork might also deal with the in-communicability of our times: we have a parallel life on the web that never comes explicit on our real life.

4 – What if

Since this art piece deals with data, it might be interesting to visualize them. I am aware of the intent of not sharing them, but it would be even more complete if the artist had chosen to show them not as they are, strings or numbers, but in a physical way, still not comprehensible: an example might be the server look alike sculpture produces little dark spheres as it collects data and stores them near the installation to show the volume of the information collected.