09.12.05 Data_cosm, news sculptures.
The use of data for pure aesthetic, ruins the means, and reduce the contents to a shapeless pile of digital material. This is handled as raw material, consisting of almost indistinguishable particles, that value only for their mutual relationship, and not as a whole of unique signs, as it usually is. Data_cosm by Michael Takeo Magruder is an application that deconstructs the news taken from the BBC service website, and then it reconstructs them in a three-dimensional data domain in which texts and pictures are blurred, even if they belong to an incorporeal whole. Therefore it is not a mere data transformation from a linguistic domain to another one, nor a functional data visualization that let new contents' relationships emerge, but a 'data sculpture'. Here the news become a grey goo, that waits to be shaped, and the software is the tool to refine and polish it. The immersive data dimension becomes a timeless abstraction of the daily news flux. This flux looses his points of references, and becomes liquid in a spatial conglomeration. This at the same time a monument to its importance and a suppression of its nature.