ECHOLOGY: Making sense of data

ECHOLOGY: Making Sense of Data brings together Australia’s leading creative talent, a world leader in urban development and three urban communities to create data-driven public artworks that drive meaningful engagement with issues surrounding sustainability, climate change and resource use.

The 21st Century is an era of pervasive and ever-increasing data collection; it tracks who we are, what we do and how we live our lives – in effect creating a complex, connected universe of information-based ecologies. Alongside this we have seen a rapid proliferation of open source publication and aggregation tools, enabling critical and creative approaches to data representation well beyond the intent and scope of those involved in its collection.

ECHOLOGY: Making Sense of Data is a three-stage project that will support the utilisation of real-time data and sensing in the production of artworks for the public realm. Each of the stakeholder groups involved with the project have different, but complementary objectives that together can be met through the project’s realisation.

  • For Lend Lease, ECHOLOGY provides a process to bring creative excellence to bear on its sustainability objectives.
  • For the local communities living alongside the artworks, ECHOLOGY provides a way of identifying their information priorities and enables them to directly engage with their local spaces.
  • For artists and designers, ECHOLOGY provides an exciting challenge as to how best to creatively present locally-sourced, real-time information in a way that is equally meaningful, magical and memorable.

ECHOLOGY is especially interested in supporting artworks that engage with the full suite of senses through inventive applications of light, sound, kinetics and natural materials. The works will be aesthetically engaging representations of real-time data, drawn from the immediate environment and presented in such a way that they make manifest often-abstract measurements relating to sustainable resource use, climate change and ecological health.

ECHOLOGY: Making Sense of Data is presented by the Australian Network for Art & Technology (ANAT) in partnership with Carbon Arts.

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