Eyeo 2016 Recap

I attended the Eyeo Festival this week. It brings together "creative coders, data designers, artists, and attendees." I have been wanting to go for a couple of years as a way to pull myself in a different direction. It's easy to get into a rut, or at least into a routine that doesn't allow you to ponder other possibilities. This was a very different conference from others that I've attended. Here, I came away feeling creative and inspired. At others, I've walked away with learning to apply. It's not that one outcome is better than another---they each have a role.

I am looking forward to the videos from the festival being posted. In the meantime, here are some of the highlights.

Emergence
Nicky Case kicked things off. His focus was on emergence, a concept where the sum is different from the parts. I can't say that he shared anything new in terms of his ideas, but what I liked was seeing a young adult share his process of learning that there is a lot of grey area in the world. I worked with teenagers for nearly 20 years, and the black/white worldview was pretty normal. It takes time and experience to learn that there are lots of answers to any question. As a young 20-something, Case is showcasing the transition to a more experienced lens on the world.

The keynote by Paola Antonelli, which was the next evening, shared an even more advanced take on this theme with her views on quantum design: "ambiguous states, in the spaces ‘in between’—between digital and physical, high-tech and crafts, old and new, nature and artifice, developed and emerging world." Beauty is not just in the eye of the beholder, meaning is derived from the eye of the observer.

Transformation
A second theme was about the transformative nature of data. Paolo Ciuccarelli of Density Design spoke about the poetics of data visualization. He pointed to the need to design data experiences that "generate poesis within a space of wonder."

from http://www.densitydesign.org/research/brain-houses-three-interieurs-stories/

One of my favourite ideas that he shared was this concept of a panorama, like the one shown above. I love the idea of embedding the data within a larger context. I highly recommend having a look at the Raw tool for generating visualizations.

Moritz Stefaner gave a talk on his Data Cuisine project. One of the things I liked most about this project was the idea that the dimensions of food (ingredients, presentation, cooking method, etc.) can be used to represent dimensions of data. This leads to a very different sort of interactive experience.

Transformation also appeared in how artists used materials in different ways. Whether it was Anouk Wipprecht combining her love of couture and robots or Tania Candiani speaking about the intersection of combination, serendipity and translation, I was blown away by the creative thought processes that were shared.



This is not the sort of end product I get at education conferences---where sharing one's thinking is not considered good enough. At those conferences, there is an expectation of audience involvement and tangible takeaways. With Eyeo, the feeling that is created through the presentation is the goal. I can't talk about this conference in terms what I learned, but rather, how it made me feel. This brings me to the last major theme.

Instruments of Power
There was a strong focus on equity at this conference, from the range of speakers, to topics, to the code of conduct. Part of that is an understanding of privilege as it applies to how we collect, use, and represent data.

Marek Tuszynski from the Tactical Technology Collective shared their recent exhibition: The View from the White Room. (E.g. looking out from an Apple store.) The show looked at questions such as What does it mean to live in a quantified society? and What is the value of data privacy when it becomes something you can buy? Lots of powerful things to think about from this session---I had to get out and take a walk after it. Part of the exhibit included something called Big Mama, based on the quote from a government official justifying surveillance that he did it because "I love you all." and the perception that the contribution of data leads to a harmonious society. Take a deeper look at Unfit-bits, Me and My Shadow, Security in a Box, and Exposing the Invisible. It is not that these concepts are new or unknown, but it's their application within our personal and professional contexts that make them worth revisiting.

As much as we talk about the power data visualization has to reveal, we rarely talk about how it can also be used to hide. In the best talk I saw, Josh Begley shaped conversation around what the work is that data visualization does. In one example, he talked about the geography of incarceration. As part of that, he made the comment that "most photos today are taken by machines for other machines to see." Satellites, drones, and other tools capture far more images than anything humans post to Instagram, Flickr, or other sites. Josh works on projects that bridge what machines are doing with what we notice. Do we want to be as connected to our foreign policy as we are to our phones? Check out his work on the Dronestream App or Officer Involved Shootings as ways to explore how the things we don't represent are still powerful enough to evoke emotion.

There were other presentations, keynotes, and sessions that I attended. There were also some I didn't get to attend due to having to get to the airport...including one I was looking forward to the most by Lynn Cherny. However, I enjoyed exploring a bit of Minneapolis, getting to meet several data viz heroes in person, and being able to think about some very different concepts for awhile. This spring has been a real drag in terms of work demands. I am looking forward to working on some new projects that are being spurred by this recent boost to my sense of creativity.

What have you seen recently that inspires you?