The Weight of Data

In this Digital Art Keynote, New York-based artist and educator Jer Thorp shows the potential of science, art and design. Thorp begins with his experience with the the first popular hypermedia system HyperCard created for Apple by Bill Atkinson, as a way for users to to make programs on their computers. This is not similar to the big-budget apps found now, but smaller scale programs, such as programs that keep track of local baseball statistics or make art.

This lead Thorp to begin working with data and combining it with art to explore the boundaries of digital art to building visual tools used to understand systems. Thorp explains the need for exploratory tools, such as the one he helped create entitled Cascade, that is giving people a vehicle to traverse through data. Not only this, but Thorp shows the importance of giving this data a human contact. As these technologies store our data, they are in fact storing our histories.