Participant: Beautiful Data II workshop sponsored by Harvard University's metaLAB and supported by the Getty Foundation. July 2015.
This 9 day workshop gathered Art Historians, Archaeologist, Designers, Curators and others to explore alternative ways of exploring, visualizing, and presenting each of our own "Problem Collections" which we brought to the conference. This workshop was instrumental in pushing how I see collaboration, prototyping, and design/architecture/visual methodologies that can come into the Social Science classroom in very productive ways.
One of the outputs from this was a project collaboratively imagined by Jackie Antig, Robin Clark, Bethany Johns, Ainslee Meredith, Meg Studer, and myself - entitled Code from Corbu -which was a site responsive piece inspired by the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts.
Code from Corbu is a site-responsive installation in which six very different collections, or datasets, collide in the concrete space of the Carpenter Center. Four architectural points—corner, back, curve, and veil—are syntactically assigned as conjunctions to elicit an array of text, audio, video and still image fragments drawn from each collection. Each conjunction is assigned an internal algorithm based on the temporal and sensorial experience of working through this collision in Corbu’s space. The proposed algorithms are randomized to allow for an almost infinite play of layering, contradiction, opacity, scale, and surface. The intended viewer will pass through ‘trigger points’ in the building to initiate the display of visual conjunctions. We wish to restage the suprise, delight, and stickiness of finding resonances between datasets and the sensorial condition of the Carpenter Building, a place of (the) concrete and the abstract.