Who Are We? Data, Audiences and Markets

• In Event: Data and Markets: Devices, Practices and Representations - II

Abstract

Art museums and galleries are not immune to the call of “bigger, better data”. Public funding subsidies are increasingly contingent on institutions demonstrating audience attention, engagement and participation. This has traditionally been based on ticket sales and surveys but arts institutions have also begun to use more responsive forms of data analytics borrowed from market research. This paper reflects back on an immersive installation Are We Data? produced for an exhibition at the Tate Modern in London in 2018. The installation explored questions about how digital data represents who ‘we’ – the audience or the market – are by staging an encounter between two screens. One screen presented a live ‘dashboard’ of data visualisations of the audience and the second, a collage of archival and contemporary images of a housing estate in Milton Keynes that flickered and glitched in response to the data in real time. The screens staged discordant visions to prompt questions about how people, culture(s) and forms of participation are known, imagined or represented. These juxtaposed representations rehearse a well known axiom from STS: that there is no god’s eye view - what can and can’t be seen always depends on where you stand and the instruments you use. We also reflect on how devices like data analytics reconfigure relations between arts institutions and audiences. Drawing on our observation of how audiences responded to the installation in situ, we argue for more experimental ways of orchestrating interactions between arts institutions and audiences, and of defining/representing participation and culture.

Authors

• Elizabeth Rose McFall, University of Edinburgh

• David Moats, Linköping University, Tema-T (Tema Technology and Social Change)