Title: Clicks (from "Modeling Big Data")
Media: Video. 1 minute, 49 seconds.
Year: 2014.
Exhibited:
Credits:
Set Stylist: Lorraine Rudin
Sound Designer: Lem Jay Ignacio.
This project is supported in part by a PSC-CUNY Award, jointly funded by The Professional Staff Congress and The City University of New York.
"Clicks" is part of "Modeling Big Data," a series of four videos in which I embody "big data." Big data is any set of data that is too big for human comprehension and must be processed by computer. Data, or raw measurements, are captured in all digital transactions. It is an increasingly common practice to not only produce data, but to retain it, storing it until it can be ordered into meaningful information. "Modeling Big Data" questions how computer culture favors hoarding, overproduction, and excess.
In "Modeling Big Data," I perform as an obese data body, a body so stuck in the cycle of generating data that it is swollen and overcome by its own data glut. I perform four data gestures: clicking, buffering, caching, and pinging. All of the videos are shot in color on monochromatic sets. The two red scenes, "Clicks" and "Buffering," represent data gestures that users typically experience; the two grey scenes, "Cached" and "Pings," represent backend data gestures that are concealed from most users.