Curating the Data Imaginary: Fears and Fantasies in the Middle of a Dataverse Takeover (like Science Fiction but Weirder)

Abstract

As our corporeal experiences were catapulted by COVID-19 to an increasingly abstract datascape, the curatorium of Katherine Moline, Angela Goddard, Blaklash (Amanda Hayman and Troy Casey) and Beck Davis postponed the exhibition The Data Imaginary: Fears and Fantasies at Griffith University Art Museum, Brisbane to 2021. Our original aim—to explore data experiments in relation to climate change, data security and urban landscapes, many informed and shaped by Indigenous knowledges—had become our reality with the global pandemic. The challenge to the norms and standards of the social imaginary—how data operates and for whom it is operationalised—made by artists, designers and scientists have become a platform for survival – outside of the gallery and in our everyday worlds. The public fears and fantasises regarding data analysis throughout the pandemic now guide our curatorial framework. This paper will explore how the curators and exhibition participants have reformulated The Data Imaginary exhibition for pandemic life in a dark Eden and how we are reviewing the selection of works so that for example, Lola Greeno’s embodied knowledge of how climate change is impacting the materiality of Palawa shell stringing on the shores of the cool waters surrounding Lutruwita (Tasmania), contrasts with Silvio Carta’s dystopian vision of human value in The Machine’s Eye - How machines see our world alongside a workshop on data security by Make or Break now made necessary by a life of ISO.