Data Artification

Abstract

Although artification is an old process, if viewed from a sociological perspective, or even prehistoric, if we accept a fundamentally behaviourist premise, its theory (or a set of theories) is just emerging. Data art and other intersecting forms of art have been around for a while. Data artification, on the other hand, has hardly been discussed in the context of how non-art, i.e. data, is turned into art by artifying microprocesses (Shapiro 2019) or adaptive nano-processes (Dissanayake 2017). The existing body of research done so far in this area emphasize the social functions of artifying things, their makers, and users. The premise of this article is that social amelioration is secondary or even irrelevant in some cases where ratification, instead, plays cognitive and phenomenological roles in the face of intellectual crisis when datafied things and activities that are entangled with our lives in ubiquitous, automated, and overused ways lose their meaning. Data artification is not concerned with making data aesthetically appealing, hence it should not be confused with the notion of aestheticization. On the contrary, by drawing on the artwork of Fabio Lattanzi Antinori and Nathalie Miebach, I will argue that data artification is intellectually dissident in more radical ways than academia. It is critically meta-artistic and meta-scientific since it deconstructs empty data fetishes and produces new meanings or knowledge-making forms in interstitial and intersemiotic ways.