Art & Culture

A Data Point Walks Into a Bar

How cold data can make you feel things.
Saal 6
Lisa Charlotte Rost
tl;dr: Mother Teresa said "If I look at the mass I will never act. If I look at the one, I will." I'll present ways that make us act when looking at the mass.
Remember when we thought that data would solve all our problems? Ah, the good old days. We thought we finally found all the important problems. And all the right answers. We just forgot one important thing: The audience of data is very often....people. Irrational people. People who didn't care if Trump lied or not in the Election Year of 2016. People who know that "millions of people starve in Africa", but who want to donate for that one hungry child in Norway they saw in a TV documentary. People who read about a portfolio company and then think the whole night about becoming a farmer in Chile, like the main character of their favourite book. Stories stick, but data doesn't. Stories stick because they make us feel something; and we remember situations in which we felt intense feelings. Stories make us act; they change our beliefs. Stories make us feel warm and empathic and alive. Data doesn't make us feel anything on it’s own. Data is cold. And still, I love data, and I love to work with it. Can we create feelings with data? Away from the beaten paths of company dashboards, scientific plots and newspaper graphics? I believe it's possible. In my talk, I will showcase some ways to present data so that it sticks and makes you feel things. We'll talk about the status quo of data presentation and where we still need to go. If you like data and want to look at more of it, you should come by.

Additional information

Type lecture
Language English

More sessions

12/27/16
Art & Culture
Nika Dubrovsky
Saal 6
I would like to present my project called Anthropology for kids and a specific book, that I am working on in the larger framework of this project. This book will look like an ordinary school notebook in which a teacher checks a student if the lesson had been learnt. But it is actually not! I gathered this collection of historical and anthropological notes, so that together with school kids we can think about how the very idea of privacy was developed in different countries and in different ...
12/27/16
Art & Culture
raquel meyers
Saal 6
Keys Of Fury is a brutalist storytelling about technology and keystrokes where text is used unadorned and roughcast, like concrete. I define my practice as KYBDslöjd (drawing by Type In) who uses the Commodore 64 computer, Teletext technologies and Typewriter. Brutalism has an unfortunate reputation of evoking a raw dystopia and KYBDslöjd evokes an “object of nostalgia”. But nostalgic‬, ‪retro‬, obsolete or ‪limited‬ are rhetoric qualities earn by constant repetition. We live in ...
12/28/16
Art & Culture
Saud Al-Zaid
Saal 6
This talk discusses the representation of Arab males in video games and the adverse effect it has on the collective political imagination. Anonymous military-aged Arab men become increasingly the exception to the laws of human rights, and become default targets for conventional and unmanned drone attacks. This devolution is seen through the lens of the changing nature of conflict through digitalization, the collapse of the nation state in Iraq and Syria, and the future of war.
12/28/16
Art & Culture
Michaela Vieser
Saal 6
Berufe aus vergangenen Zeiten
12/28/16
Art & Culture
Kate Genevieve
Saal 6
Inspired by a long history of bold reality hacks this talk considers the kinds of potentials opening up through emerging Virtual Reality (VR) and Mixed Reality technologies. In this current moment of climate crisis and structural metamorphosis how can we work with powerful immersive technologies to understand our own perceptual systems, to radically communicate and to innovate new ways of being together?
12/28/16
Art & Culture
Saal 1
Der Kampf der Hinterbliebenen um die Wahrheit --- Geride kalanların gerçekler için savaşı
12/29/16
Art & Culture
James Bridle
Saal G
James Bridle is a British writer and artist living in Greece. His work explores the impact of technology on society, law, geography, politics, and culture. His Drone Shadow installations have appeared on city streets worldwide, he has mapped deportation centres with CGI, designed new kinds of citizenship based on online behaviour. and used neural networks and satellite images to predict election results. A New Dark Age is an exploration of what we can no longer know about the world, and what we ...