Luke DuBois Forum Post

deep data for real connection

Since shortly after its inception, the computer has been used for nefarious means, whether it be calculating the launch of a torpedo with moving targets, or predicting what kind of advertisements will sell a product the most effectively. Data is naked and thanks to a computer, we may compile and organize data in such a way that its nakedness is illuminated. This illumination has been used to bring harm to others because it exposes necessary information. It becomes the responsibility of the computer engineer to decide what information is necessary to illuminate. Luke DuBois believes that good data elucidates and bad data anesthetizes, but all data reduces people to numbers. Remember, data is naked, and that nakedness exposes people as numbers, which may in turn illuminate patterns in their behavior. In a wonderful presentation by Luke DuBois, he cycles through a few different artistic representations of data which remind us that these illuminations can be creative as much as they can be informative, and as playful as they can be consequential. 

One portrait of data that particularly resonated with me was his Take a Bullet for This City piece. The piece addressed gun violence and gun emergencies with blunt honesty. Ever time someone calls 911 to report a "discharging firearm". Regardless of how you feel about the politics of gun violence, you will hear a gun being fired live at the same time as the act is reported to the police. Such an experience will elicit a reaction from deep within oneself due to the visceral nature of the loud and shocking event. Each person experiencing this piece will most likely react differently, due to everyone's unique history and relationship with guns or loud sounds in general. However, the information being telegraphed never changes. Waiting for a gun that is synchronized to 911 gun violence reports to fire will remind you that the gun is also only ever waiting to share a piece of information with you. This information is able to elicit an array of reactions not only because of our individual relationships with guns and their history, but also because the information being presented intersects at multiple points of meaning which constructs a multidimensional schema that can engage several potent psychological triggers in the brain.
A gun firing in synch with respective 911 reports forces the brain the consider time, frequency or infrequency of shots, volume, the violent explosion being triggered, and the politics that accompanies the experience. A single gun shot, or lack there of, can engage all of these aspects of the experience generating complex internal emotions from the varied external stimuli. Computers are one of the only devices that may internalize, organize and represent complex data in a way that relays visceral and multidimensional information to humans for us to interpret meaning from and emotionally react to. In the same way that we associate meaning and emotionally react to worlds of sound constructed from complimentary timbres and harmonies, computers present complimentary data that shape into discernible structures of information with deep meaning of their own.
In a world surrounded by these incredible tools, one must recognize their responsibility to put such tools to use. If we do not, someone else will, and their art or ideology will be able to resonate farther and more convincingly than those of someone who neglects the potential of computers and their ability to construct and spread meaning through data organization.