Incidental Data is an exhibition of work by designers and artists that falls outside of conventional information visualisation. Devoid of graphs, charts, diagrams, and network maps, this exhibition sets out to reimagine information visualisation practices currently dominated by the promises of big data.
Through analogue visual practices such by drawing, photographing, and collaging, these artists and designers materialise, measure, record and reveal what remains largely unseen. In their hands leaking pens, sculpted lipsticks, trees-that-draw, sonic barcodes, scraps of type and toy-gun blueprints are sources of materially rich data/information that provide insight into natural phenomena and human activity.
They become amateur timekeepers, meteorologists, archivists, and ethnographers, visually documenting natural phenomena and human activity.
Included in the exhibition was the work of six leading international and local designers and artists: Stacey Green, Tim Knowles, Daniel Eatock, Christopher Baker, Sam Winston and Chris Gaul. This exhibition was also accompanied by the seminar Data Poetry, which brought together designers and researchers (Mitchell Whitelaw, Elisa Lee, Ben Hosken and Kate Sweetapple) to investigate the implications of this work on the field of information visualisation.
