The Data Dilemma: Creative Solutions for Data-Driven Futures

About the Event

Exploring creative solutions to our data-driven future

Can data visualization aid in scientific exploration? Can we design the bias out of algorithms? Come investigate these issues with an evening of unique programming that looks at our data-driven future and how artists and designers can help shape it. Join us for a panel discussion featuring artists exhibiting in the Seeing the Unseeable: Data, Design, Art exhibition and a keynote message from Safiya Noble, author of Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. With refreshments and an opportunity to view the exhibition in between.

Schedule of Events

4 - 6 p.m.
(Special extended gallery hours)
Williamson Gallery

View the PST ART: Art and Science Collide exhibition, Seeing the Unseeable: Data, Design, Art. Curators will be on hand.
This multifaceted exhibition explores how contemporary art, design and culture respond to data's impact on daily life. Drawing attention to prescient concepts regarding the selection, collection, and dissemination of data, the exhibition considers data visualization as a practice and as a model for deeper exploration. Part of Getty's PST ART: Art & Science Collide, the exhibition features the work of more than 16 artists and designers, including Refik Anadol, Data to Discovery, Rafael Lozano Hemmer, Giorgia Lupi and Ehren Shorday, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Semiconductor, Mika Tajima, Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg, Margaret Wertheim and Christine Wertheim, and others.

The Exhibition is open to the public (no ticket necessary) Wed-Sat, noon to 5 p.m.

A Gallery Reception will be held at the adjacent Boardroom for ticket holders.

4:45 p.m.: Panel Discussion: Data in the Digital Age at Ahmanson Auditorium

How do we make sense of big data? This conversation features artists and designers at the forefront of data visualization practice and education. Panelists include Santiago Lombeyda and Hillary Mushkin, both from the Data to Discovery initiative; and Jason Forrest and Jen Ray of Data Vandals, artists-in-residence in ArtCenter's Designmatters social impact program for the Fall 2024 term. Moderated by Maggie Hendrie, dean of ArtCenter's Media and Technology and organized in conjunction with Seeing the Unseeable: Data, Design, Art and the Getty's PST ART: Art & Science Collide.

6:15 p.m.: Keynote presentation by Safiya Noble at Ahmanson Auditorium

The work of Safiya Noble, author of Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, brings a valuable critical lens to design and technology that raises important questions around issues which societies around the globe continue to grapple. As AI and algorithms continue working their way into the public imagination, Noble deepens our understanding of their potential for harm and enables us to advocate for better futures.

About the Speakers

Data to Discovery is a data visualization, art and design research initiative, based at NASA/JPL, Caltech and ArtCenter College of Design. Over the course of a decade, Data to Discovery has investigated how experimental interdisciplinary teamwork in computing, art, co-design and research enable and critically engage scientific discovery. ArtCenter faculty and designer Santiago Lombeyda and LA based artist Hillary Mushkin co-lead the Data to Discovery team. The research initiative intersects data visualization, art and design across NASA/JPL, Caltech and ArtCenter. Consisting of students, faculty and researchers, the team co-designs advanced interactive visualization systems with NASA/JPL and Caltech scientists and engineers, opening new pathways of investigating research data, leading to new discoveries.

The Data Vandals create art works, performances, installations and social interventions to present data in interesting, exciting and surprising new ways. New York based artist Jen Ray and data visualization designer Jason Forrest are part of the collaborative art team Data Vandals. Data Vandals present performative art practices that draw on data research across diverse topics. The work culminates to create public interactive data narratives that bridges the abstract, hidden, qualities of data into lived experiences. Their projects are created collaboratively with students and others via exhibition commissions and residencies across academic and art institutions.

Dr. Safiya U. Noble is the David O. Sears Presidential Endowed Chair of Social Sciences and professor of Gender Studies, African American Studies, and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She is the director of the Center on Race & Digital Justice and co-director of the Minderoo Initiative on Tech & Power at the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry (C2i2). She currently serves as interim director of the UCLA DataX Initiative, leading work in critical data studies for the campus. Professor Noble is the author of the best-selling book on racist and sexist algorithmic harm in commercial search engines, entitled Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (NYU Press), which has been widely-reviewed in scholarly and popular publications. In 2021, she was recognized as a MacArthur Foundation Fellow for her groundbreaking work on algorithmic discrimination.

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