This was a two year collaborative research project funded by the Austrian Research Science Foundation [FWF-PEEK]. Data Loam was designed as a multi-faceted arts-based approach to one of the more intractable and urgent problems facing our contemporary digital environment today: the massive proliferation of data, and with it, a particularly nuanced set of complexities confronting our national libraries, universities, research labs as well non-academic cultural institutions and industry-oriented environments. The urgency of the problem circled around three areas: archiving (what to archive and how), accessibility (how to ensure that knowledges systems would remain, intrinsically, ‘open’ in the face of ever-increasing data) and experimental (enabling creativity, intelligence, curiosity, diversity and risk to remain as fundamental to our way of life). In so doing, Data Loam rejected the entrenched paradigm of indexicality as the only method capable of articulating the ‘how’, ‘what’, ‘where’ and ‘when’ of our contemporary world as the 'internet of things'. This meant rejecting also the entrenched Cold War 'binaric systematizing that tended to promote apocalyptic narratives of technology pitting ‘man’ against ‘machine’, and in so doing, taking as given the end of freedom, rule of law, governance and indeed humanity itself. Instead, Data Loam took as its starting point precisely the unruly materiality of information, with its the massive proliferation, messy logics, oddly cathected derivatives of circulation and exchange, navigational gaming, multi-dimensional visualities, crypto-economies, block-chain equivalences, and complexly sutured arenas of cultural difference. Rather than trying to compartmentalise, frame, cut-down, or force into silos or pockets of information, Data Loam foreground this exponential explosion of Big Data. It did so, first and foremost, by putting art-based research and practice at its core, emphasising the logics of sense, planes of immanence, feedback loops, multi-dimensionality, entanglement, and diffraction.

Data Loam was able to reach its main goal: the articulation of how data becomes self-organised and can produce a kind of open self-governance that relies of the mass proliferation of information. On a practical level, this included developing an algorithm that could enable a new lexicographical search and tag organising system. Perhaps most significantly, »Data Loam« answered the question of ‘how’ correlations ‘matter’; that is to say, how correlations generate matter, and in so doing enable heterogeneous and local dimensionalities that ‘in-form’ aesthetic-ethical-political ecosystems.

The project was linked with teaching /studio work with the MA students at the University of Applied Arts and the PHD students at the RCA (Entanglement Research Group). It was connected with RIAT (Vienna) and was rolled out in various exhibitions in Berlin, Vienna, Singapore, New Zealand and London. National libraries included: The British Library, the Austrian National Library, The German Federal Archive, the Humboldt University (Institute for Library and information Science), and Tisch School of Arts (NYU).

This repository addition is for the grant itself. A forthcoming publication will have its own file deposit.

This global research project involved more than 25 international Engagement Activities, including:

2019-09-13 - PHDARTS Fall Programme KABK Royal Academy of Art, The Hague (NL)
2019-06-07 - NYU Orphan Film Symposium, Vienna (AT)
2018-12-14 - Media Cities Conference, Vienna (AT)
2018-06-23 - ISEA 2018, Durban (South Africa)
2018-02-22 - 106th CAA Annual Conference, Los Angeles
2017-09-22 - Papernek Symposium »Design and Ethics«, London (UK)
2017-11-04 - Ethereum Devcon 3, Cancun (Mexico)

It involve several industry partners as well as academic and cultural institutions, including:
-RIAT - The Institute for Future Cryptoeconomics (Vienna)
-Austrian Film Museum – as host in the EU-funded »i Media Cities« project www.imediacities.eu
-Austrian National Library (OENB) – as partner in the »OENB Labs« project labs.onb.ac.at
-Alan Turing Institute (London) – in context of the »Living with Machines« project www.turing.ac.uk/research/research-projects/living-machines
-British Library (London) – in context of the »British Library Labs« project www.bl.uk/projects/british-library-labs
-German Federal Archive (Bundesarchiv) – cooperation with the federal film archive
-Humboldt University Berlin – exchange with the »Institut für Bibliotheks- und Informationswissenschaft«
-University of Innsbruck – exchange with the head of the university’s Library
-University of Vienna »Institut für Germanistik« – in context of »Campus Medius« campusmedius.net
-New York University (NYU) – as organizer of the »Orphan Film Symposium« www.filmmuseum.at/kinoprogramm/schiene?schienen_id=1551791568946
-Connect Archives Initiative (CAI) – cooperation with this international research and digital film library development lab that is part of the EU SCENESOR project