SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Museum of Craft and Design begins the year with a new virtual exhibition, Imagining Data, available online.

Over the years data has become a buzzword, and a precious commodity—what we divulge through online activity is more valuable than the purchases and transactions we may be making. Our current status—personal, societal, political, environmental—can be described in terms of numbers and algorithms. Even the Covid-19 pandemic has made statistics an international obsession as we follow contagion, spikes, vaccine efficacy rates, and hospital capacities.

Guest curated by Ginger Duggan and Judy Fox of c2-curatorsquared, Imagining Data presents a selection of artists from around the world, who are showing what data can look like, in paintings, drawings, sculpture, audio-visual installation, fashion, and even performance. Data visualization is a discipline unto itself and is by no means a new way of making art. The artists showcased in this exhibition are developing systems to transform data into images, rationalizing the image-making process while creating resonating works of art.

Participating artists and designers and their data-inspired work are divided into the following four subject areas:

Natural/Environmental Conditions showcases artists who are harvesting data that describes the universe, records the weather, and monitors environmental conditions. The works in this grouping help us grasp the enormity of the universe and helps visibly conceptualize phenomenons that can be too enormous to wrap our minds around. Aude Moreau's artwork proposal, La ligne bleue #2, is a site-specific intervention that would stretch across twenty buildings along Manhattan's waterfront. The line is meant to represent the rising sea level resulting from melting glaciers and ice caps that is predicted if humanity continues on its current trajectory. This dire message is translated into a subtle and minimal form designed to attract that viewer and convey the warning for those wanting to dig deeper into the meaning of the residual blue line.

Personal Biometrics highlights artists who have visually charted abstract concepts related to our bodies (what we are made of, how we look, what we feel, how we learn, etc.) through objects, images, fashion, and performance. In looking at what we are made of, artist Andrew Yang creates a portrait of his daughter at birth based on the six elements that make up 99 percent of her material being (carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorous, hydrogen, and calcium) and then again seven years later with a different set of materials to represent the six elements (this time including plastics and fertilizers), giving a nod to the different kinds of materials that have been incorporated into her body. Yang’s representation of his daughter’s chemical makeup offers a reminder that most matter is composed of the same elements; it is simply their combination that determines the final form.

Communal Movement represents artists whose work focuses on shifts of populations whether it be through immigration, migration, or mass movements that have been instigated by political policies and economics. One timely example is the work of Ben Doessel and James Lee, who created a font that addressed the inequity behind the practice of “gerrymandering” in congressional districts. Each of the 26 letters of the alphabet represents a gerrymandered district. (For example, the letter “U” symbolizes Illinois’ 4th District.) The resulting odd shapes that are forced into letter forms are the perfect visualization of an illogical practice designed to ensure continued voter disenfranchisement. The font is available to download for free on their website, www.uglygerry.com, which serves as a place for visitors to craft their own message to politicians using the font and tweet it.

Randomized Content showcases artists seeking patterns and reasons, looking for rationales through multimedia endeavors. From the elegant to the hilarious, artists such as Nina Katchadourian, explore the unpredictable. Katchadourian’s witty sound sculpture, Talking Popcorn, represents language and translation, or the loss thereof and the implications of misunderstanding and misinterpretation. Using the principles of Morse Code, she rigged a system to transcribe the sounds made from popping corn into a language of sorts.

Though some of the works in Imagining Data are elegantly hard-edged and precise, as one might imagine, many others are remarkably poetic and expressive. The works offer a colorful, beautiful, and abstract look at our world as it is increasingly shaped by data.

Participating Designers: Jill Baroff, Alicja Biala/Iwo Borkowicz, Louis Cameron, Tiffany Chung, Ghost of a Dream and Jennifer Dalton, Ben Doessel/James Lee, Ekene Ijeoma, Spencer Finch, Richard Ibghy/Marilou Lemmens, Nina Katchadourian, Giorgia Lupi, Aude Moreau, Katie Paterson, Dario Robleto, Evan Roth, PLAYLAB, INC. and Family New York in collaboration with Floating Point, Melati Suryodarmo, Alison Tsai, Norwood Viviano, Jorinde Voigt, Lee M. Walton, Andrew S. Yang, Yu-Wen Wu