Data Excavations- the New (S)oil

A Kinetic Light Art Installation. This artwork focuses on drawing parallels of excavations of Earth’s resources by heavy machinery and the large scale excavations of human data today. Often intangible, data excavations have the potential to go unnoticed. We don’t realize the extractive nature of AI and data. On the flip side of this extraction is the other scope determined by intentionality, it’s the possibility of progress that machines like excavators have brought about- data allows us to build on insights and create pillars of progress too. The work brings forth this parallel through a kinetic light installation where the artist plans installs glowing light channels to the arms of industrial excavators and choreographs a movement of the machinery to write the words ‘data’ and ‘soil’ in a continuous loop.

The work is created to be both a large scale installation in an open land space with life size excavator machines, with the choreography of writing performed by trained operators and an indoor installation on a table-top with scaled down toy excavator machines with a custom electronic circuitry to perform the writing movements autonomously in a loop.