Week 10
Data of the Absurd
We looked at some examples of absurd data to remember humour is an important part of the data vis process.
Firstly, the image I’ve added here was made by myself and one of my classmates. A small activity we did in class was creating a flow chart or diagram of any kind of data collected from pretty much anything - remembering that humour and absurdity is important here. We chose to look at the ‘This is America’ music video by Childish Gambino. We mapped out the different facial expressions made by Childish Gambino, looking at frames of the video in 20 second increments. We created a spectrum of happy to sad, and normal to weird. The smaller images show the frames from 40 seconds in, 1 minute in and 4 minutes in. It was actually really fun to put this together and also let me get to know my classmates a bit better.
We also looked at some examples of absurd data. ‘Exhausting a Crowd’, by Kyle Mcdonald, allows people to make comments and tag areas on the website (https://www.exhaustingacrowd.com/gwangju). The footage is delayed by an hour to prevent anyone knowing the location of the people in the video, so no one can be stalked. Some other cool examples include ‘Geogoo’ by JODI, ‘Sexed Robots’ by Paul Granjon and ‘Photography in Abundance’ by Eric Kessels.
