Photo by Sébastien Roy
How can we document the very process of curating digital archives and databases? How can we frame their evolution, and define what type of knowledge they provide at different stages? What do they tell us? What’s missing?
Immersive datascapes (and other modes of knowing) is a project by ODL Fellow Giulia Taurino that explores the epistemology and design of online archives and databases deployed for new media research, by taking as a case study MIT’s Docubase, an ongoing curatorial initiative for collecting data on “people, projects, and technologies transforming documentary in the digital age.” Developed in collaboration with Montreal’s Society for Arts and Technology and the Artefact Lab, this project aims at creating a full dome, interactive visual guide for reading Docubase, by asking the larger public to actively re-invent its composition and engage with the database as a lively, dynamic, co-curated collection. Through the use of creative coding and data visualization techniques, the adaptive design will favor an exploratory and participatory experience, by taking an artistic/activist approach to new media archival practices and proposing alternative points of view on ways of caring, curing, curating the database, in a deeper attempt to foster a process of unlearning and activate other modes of knowing. This immersive, co-creative media experience ultimately aspires to unveil invisible narratives contained in the database and to problematize their socio-cultural impact, while representing much more than a static repository: a documentary act itself.