art.park.data

art.park.data
24 Sep to 16 Nov 2015
Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park
Westfield John Lewis entrance
Directions and Map

Artist Stefanie Posavec has created art.park.data for the East London Canvas, a 32.5m long data visualisation, drawing from data collected by children taking part in School’s (Not Quite) Out for Summer.

The children became ‘data explorers’ in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, collecting measurable information, or data, with creative technologists Codasign.

Using Raspeberry Pis (credit card sized computers) fitted with special sensor HATs, they gathered the data and then explored how it would be possible to present it in a pictorial or graphical format.

‘Collecting moments, not things’
Stefanie Posavec

When playing outside in a park, children often pick up stones, shells, insects, and flowers to take home with them, sometimes adding to a larger collection. While it’s usually younger children who create natural collections of found objects, this scavenging habit is one that many people hold onto even as adults, as they wander through the outdoors.

The children in the Summer School did a similar type of collecting in the Park except they approached it using technology. In today’s world, we collect data and leave nature untouched.

art.park.data functions as a collection of these moments, where the data becomes a souvenir of the children’s experience in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. 

It explores ways of ‘recreating’ the Park landscape from the data the children collected, alluding visually to the slightly imperfect aspect of this task: while data can provide insight, it doesn’t fully illustrate the emotional experience of being outdoors in a park. Instead, we make guesses and try to re-create it as best we can, but the outcome will be diffuse, blurred, and hazy.

East London Canvas is created by Lendlease and LCR in partnership with Foundation for FutureLondon.