That didn’t take long: artists have surged into the wake left by whistle-blowers like Edward Snowden, whose revelations of America’s massive surveillance program roiled the murky waters of international politics.
An art show in Munich last month, Big Data Art 2013, interprets digital information. One piece, by German artists Sebastian Drack and Tobias Feldmeier, changed shape and colour whenever someone sent a contentious word into cyberspace on Twitter. The words were included on the list of hundreds of keywords monitored by American security agents, reported The Guardian.
The following video is one example. I don’t find its audio and visual interpretation of data at all attractive. It is, in truth, downright uncomfortable. And that’s the point.
APNOA Trailer from Sebastian Drack on Vimeo.