Two weeks ago I visited the ‘Big Bang Data’ exhibition in Somerset House with my theoretical studies class for UNI. I really enjoyed it!!! The exhibition itself had a good balance of interactive, visual and informative displays; with a compilation of mediums used such as print, sculpture, video, web sites, booklets, photographs, charts, illustrations… the list goes on. Wonderful!

There’s something refreshing about visiting an exhibition and wanting to actually see EverythingYouPossiblyCanInTheTimeYouHave. As you may / may not know, I like to record things on Snapchat because it is not only super handy but you can look back on your day as a whole and see how much fun you’ve had (or how much time you’ve wasted!) 🙂 On that note here is the exhibition through my eyes.

The video had ‘How big, how blue, how beautiful’ – Florence and The Machine – as a song, but according to ‘You-Tube’ Florence and The Machine have “copyrighted” the song and I was infringing upon it 😐 If only she had used creative commons! I even credited her in the description. Ah well 2 minutes and 8 seconds of silence it is… Sorry!

Two of my favourite pieces were the ticket machine (that was broken before me, and I managed to fix it before anyone saw) and the astronomy representation of data. The former was a website to which you uploaded a device – oyster, phone etc and then chose who could access your data and how much it was worth. Then it prints out your receipt with the type of data, and value you desire. This I found quite funny because of receiving many cold calls trying to gather information from surveys, with google using my search history to give me relevant advertisements and numerous ways companies check your usage to collect data and analyse me as a consumer and as a citizen. With this in mind, I very much like the sound of controlling my own data and how much I give away / sell to companies or the state.

The information on the latter was minimal, and described the piece as a representation of data. I liked it because I thought the presentation was very beautiful. I think the vagueness of the gallery curation made me wonder what the data was about. I began to consider the way it was represented and why. There is constant movement as well as change, so perhaps it is live data? It is interpreted like shooting stars, single stars and constellations in the night sky, maybe the data has something to do with the universe or the travel, groups and individuality of data. I feel that this visual data was the most pleasing to look at because they had filled the inside of a huge dome with the beautiful illustration, flowing and twinkling, giving you familiarity and curiousness.

It’s on till the 20th of March, so if you have a free afternoon and you’re in London, I recommend you go!  >>> BIG BANG DATA

xox Much love Holly xox