The Audiences Would Be the Artists and their Life Would Be the Arts

across the Internet is entirely abstract and intangible. But in 1995, artist Natalie Jeremijenko quite literally tapped into the bit stream coursing through the local network at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), transforming the flow of data into a physically perceptible phenomenon. Her installation, titled Dangling String, consists of a long plastic fiber that is attached to an electric motor and mounted on the ceiling. Each bit traveling across a stretch of nearby Ethernet cable triggers the motor. During periods of heavy network activity, the string whirls rapidly. When traffic is light, the motor twitches sporadically, almost undetectably. Jeremijenko’s elegant and accessible piece represents an important step in the quest by artists to reveal the mostly invisible realm of electronic data, a world increasingly astonishing in its size and nature. Today, almost every aspect of our lives can be “rendered” digitally. Advances in data collection technologies have made commonplace continuous, high-resolution measurements of our physical environment (weather patterns, seismic events, ecological indicators). Equally open to observation are our routine movements through and interactions with our physical surroundings (automobile and air traffic, large-scale land use). In computermediated settings, our activities either depend crucially on or consist entirely of complex digital data (financial transactions, accesses to global information systems, Web site and Internet use). As a reflection of the diversity and variety of the systems under study, these data-based descriptions of our daily lives tend to be massive in size, dynamic in character, and replete with rich structures. The advent of these enormous repositories of digital information presents us with an interesting challenge. How can we represent and interpret such complex, abstract, and socially important data? In a new collaboration, Ear to the Ground, we’ve begun exploring ways to create experiential encounters with otherwise abstract data streams, especially through sound (see http://cm.belllabs.com/stat/ear). As part of our initial efforts, we gathered several examples of what we term data art, works produced by artists, designers, and engineers that challenge our traditional notions of information display. These pieces each have an aesthetic function, but because of their reliance on data, they also serve as a basis for forming inferences about the phenomena they describe. The phrase we borrowed as the title for this article, “The audiences would be the artists and their life would be the arts,” is from a comment made in 1966 by pianist Glenn Gould, who speculated on the nature of art in the electronic age. Gould imagined the possibilities of involving the audience, and information about them, in the process of creating and performing works of art. What makes this statement compelling now is the fact that so much information is readily available about the public—Gould’s audience/artists.