Things and Times

Through adding a wide range of types of data to the algorithm, I set up a system that tells about as many different entities, things, happenings, schedules, shifts, infrastructure and lives in the city as possible. During the process, the types of data were divided in broadly three categories, the first category being data with real-time APIs that we found on various digital platforms.

In Newcastle, we had around 250 data points. For many of these we worked with the Urban Observatory, an urban data research platform where the API’s of various data streams are published for open use. The sensors that the Urban Observatory have deployed and added to their network span from air-quality sensors to river-level sensors to sensors that monitor the activities in bee hives. In addition to this measurable, real-time data, I added a second category – static data of schedules and shifts – that were manually added to the database.

Part of my research process was unstructured fieldwork; strolling through the city (a contemporary data derive?), chatting to locals about the best restaurants, bars, important shops, communities, institutions, local scenes, and so on. A third category of data is what we call ‘fluff data’. These are data points that I wrote to reflect human and animal behaviour in the data stream. The intention was to include streams that represent typical urban scenes and that, theoretically, would be detectable by smart CCTV cameras and video analytic programmes (‘a woman walks down the street’) as well as pointing to systems that exist in data form but which we didn’t have access to (‘the driver is on the way’). Fluff data is not based on a schedule or an API, but on my understanding of the city and its citizens, seen through the lens of sensing technology. Due to privacy laws we had no access to this type of data; neither CCTV streams nor the backboard of Uber, Deliveroo or other similar platforms. To write the fluff data I sat outside or in cafe’s and observed interactions in the street, very much inspired by George Perec’s ‘Exhausting a Place in Paris’.

In not too long I will be off to Austin, Texas to show the third commission of Every Thing Every Time at SXSW. At the moment I’m researching data sources and writing poem lines that will be fed into the Austin API. As I wasn’t able to visit Austin beforehand, my strategy of strolling and urban encounters to generate data sources happens digitally instead. Meanwhile, RASKL, the fabrication studio that I’ve worked with on each iteration, is packing up the new screen – a big, split-flap display that can be broken down and reassembled with minimal work. This latest iteration of the work  is in a new colour scheme, with a fresh typeface. The piece consists of 120 split-flap units, and a few hundred thousand moving pieces. Each part of the project is custom built and very complex, from the mechanics of the screen to the technology that converts real-time poems to letters on the display to the ‘pre-written’ poetry lines. But what the audience reads on the display remains very simple and is hopefully food for thought.