Colony

Data visualisation of a day in London. Artwork in collaboration with David Hedberg.

Just about everything we do, such as our browsing habits, conversations, places we visit, and our predicted intents is increasingly being analysed and monetized somewhere - generating value to someone based on our every day lives. These are invisible transactions to most of us, done on ‘free to use’ platforms and applications adding to an exponentially growing stack of ‘big data’, often proclaimed as “the new oil”.

We constantly emit information in an uncontrolled fashion just by going about our lives. Similarly to bees whom generate honey in excess, we both have ‘beekeepers’ around us with the know-how to extract value from this unforeseen product. It is unlikely that bees are aware that they are part of a business model when they go about their daily routines. We think that people are aware but find it hard to relate to what exactly generates value when the data is intangible. This made us interested in making the data visible through the use of sculpture and metaphor.

We created this artificial honey comb that turns data-sets into honey as a physical representation of this situation and time where the honey comb is the city, the bees are the citizens and the honey is the information, ready to go on the shelf in real time.