Stanza, The Reader | MEET Ground Floor

The Reader is a large six foot data visualization sculpture of the artist Stanza wearing a hoodie reading a book. The sculpture becomes a pulsing algorithmic heartbeat of living data. It is made with custom made digital software and hardware generating live events inside the sculpture. The Reader is a machine for the systems age. The Reader is a data visualisation sculpture about artificial intelligence and machine learning. Data is taking over our bodies and making its very own nervous system. The artwork uses open data and new technologies to question audiences’ experiences of real-time events. We live in a world of infobesity, we are bombarded with information that is made malleable inside the artwork, it is shaped to give it meaning. The data body acts to reposition a future view of ourselves when embedded technologies will become part of our everyday lives. In the future there will be different varieties of man and machine all embedded with different levels of technology and therefore experience and knowledge.

What will happen in the future when embedded chips in our bodies have access to the world’s information data and knowledge? Who will have access to this world of data and how will you know who does? What happens when AI and machine intelligence becomes part of our human fabric?

The artwork explores new ways of thinking about life, the emergence and interaction within public space. This interactive system is based on a 3d scan of the artist’s body. After scanning the artist’s body the file was modelled into the shapes that are cut. The whole construction is then assembled like a jigsaw. Over one hundred micro display screens show data pulsing through the body. The artwork took over one year to design and make.