Sentience of Data

What do images want?  W.J.T. Mitchell,  the Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago, says images are not just what they mean or what they do, but what is the secret of their vitality – what do they want?  I ask what do my images want and also what do these data want.  This question of what data want will be discussed later when I talk about the sentience of data.  Data want to show their sentience. 

What is beginning to emerge in this new art form is a synthesis of humans and machines that allows us to move beyond the dualism of subconscious and conscious, of order and chaos, to a new synthesis and clarity of who we are as complete people. 

I augment my skills and aesthetics with human data as a tool to help generate colors, shapes, perspectives, and camera angles.  Pressing data to extremes with powerful computers and software can reveal a sentience in the data.  Computers can show us who we are as they sort, merge, split, and order our data into previously unknown patterns. 

Through all my various careers, including the current one as a data artist, I noticed that data can describe itself through various visual forms and sounds made from the data.  In this sense I describe data as being sentient.  Another level of data sentience is what W.J.T. Mitchell talks about with images wanting something from the viewer.  In this same manner I can say that one’s data wants something from its owner.  This want is part of what I try to bring out when creating a data portrait for a collector.  Data has always had a way of seeing its world and ‘talking’ to me about it.  I am trying to visualize for others the sentience I see and feel in the data. 

Data as Art project:  I am collaborating with Paul Golding who is creating a data as art project which has philosophical underpinnings that point to David Deutsch, artificial intelligence, data as metaphor, theories about the origins of the universe, and others.  One of Paul’s ideas out of David’s Constructor theory would suggest that aesthetics is not a subjective quality.  This has implications for an objective set of algorithms and/or data that could not only represent, but also, augment human aesthetics.