Abstract
This chapter describes two practice-based research projects that render self-tracking data as installation artworks: NAVSTAR (2020) and Dendro/Volume (2020). For both works, personal data is collected and rendered as artworks within white cube exhibition spaces. These two artworks relate to practices of data physicalisation, where robotic fabrication is used to translate data into physical artefacts. However, both NAVSTAR and Dendro/Volume depart from more conventional approaches to data visualisation that focus on creating visual patterns and generating actionable insights into health data. Instead, I use the term data installation to propose a situated approach to rendering health data that draws attention to the relation between materials, site, and data. As I see it, these factors are inherent, though largely underacknowledged, to data physicalisation. Expanding from this position, I suggest that how materials and data relate to specific white cube and non-gallery sites warrants closer attention and offers expanded approaches to data physicalisation practice.
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This work was supported by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society under Grant CE200100005.
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Wozniak-O’Connor, V. (2023). Data, Site, Materials: Robotics and Digital Fabrication Within Installation Art. In: Dunstan, B.J., Koh, J.T.K.V., Turnbull Tillman, D., Brown, S.A. (eds) Cultural Robotics: Social Robots and Their Emergent Cultural Ecologies. Springer Series on Cultural Computing. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28138-9_5
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