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Start Date
25-6-2022 12:00 AM
End Date
25-6-2022 12:00 AM
Abstract
Lotfi Zadeh recognized a dissatisfaction with precise systems, and defined his area of study as, “the issue of unsharpness of class boundaries — that is, the failure of things in the physical world to conform to classical Boolean logic, the true-or-false, black-or-white, zero-or-one mathematics that underpins much of computer science” (Roberts). I am applying feminist media studies to the idea of ‘fuzzy data’ in order to confront our foundations among research landscapes and trouble expressions of data units via remediation through form and material.
For this critical creative project, triptych pinwork // precision, I engage participants in the haziness of geographic information and data by juxtaposing the quantum unknowing of pinning data, location, currents. Through three pinworks, I actualize the interpretive gap of placing a pin mark to map information:
1. a completed wall sculpture
* A representation generated from wind data from June hurricanes in Orlando using T-pins and sewing needles to chart a composite image.
* Prompts questions about imaging forces in motion, presence in threatening space, how do we visualize the wind? What else might we attempt to plot?
2. a collaborative pinning
* A campus map, nesting the conference centers, the University, and Orlando.
* Console-ing Passions participants, and the UCF community, will co-create: conceptualizing their locations among the spaces they inhabit during the conference.
* Prompts to think about how to represent self in space with multiple pins; thinking about where they are; hybrid conference structures.
3. a born-digital custom Google map
* This invites the expanded conference community, as well as the public, to respond with geotagged locations and IP addresses.
* Interrogates complicit surrendering of private, identifiers of their own digital traces, problematics of location in digital space.
Inspired by Maya Lin’s Pin River, these nested portraits will be realized in generative acts, considering the cartesian moments that disregard and dismiss the complexities of information and interpretation. And yet, we experience lines and boundaries and points and countables. This work resists the pinned-down defining we long for, bringing new questions to the surface, whereby our own hands hesitate to drop a pin.
triptych pinwork // precision
Lotfi Zadeh recognized a dissatisfaction with precise systems, and defined his area of study as, “the issue of unsharpness of class boundaries — that is, the failure of things in the physical world to conform to classical Boolean logic, the true-or-false, black-or-white, zero-or-one mathematics that underpins much of computer science” (Roberts). I am applying feminist media studies to the idea of ‘fuzzy data’ in order to confront our foundations among research landscapes and trouble expressions of data units via remediation through form and material.
For this critical creative project, triptych pinwork // precision, I engage participants in the haziness of geographic information and data by juxtaposing the quantum unknowing of pinning data, location, currents. Through three pinworks, I actualize the interpretive gap of placing a pin mark to map information:
1. a completed wall sculpture
* A representation generated from wind data from June hurricanes in Orlando using T-pins and sewing needles to chart a composite image.
* Prompts questions about imaging forces in motion, presence in threatening space, how do we visualize the wind? What else might we attempt to plot?
2. a collaborative pinning
* A campus map, nesting the conference centers, the University, and Orlando.
* Console-ing Passions participants, and the UCF community, will co-create: conceptualizing their locations among the spaces they inhabit during the conference.
* Prompts to think about how to represent self in space with multiple pins; thinking about where they are; hybrid conference structures.
3. a born-digital custom Google map
* This invites the expanded conference community, as well as the public, to respond with geotagged locations and IP addresses.
* Interrogates complicit surrendering of private, identifiers of their own digital traces, problematics of location in digital space.
Inspired by Maya Lin’s Pin River, these nested portraits will be realized in generative acts, considering the cartesian moments that disregard and dismiss the complexities of information and interpretation. And yet, we experience lines and boundaries and points and countables. This work resists the pinned-down defining we long for, bringing new questions to the surface, whereby our own hands hesitate to drop a pin.
Bio
Nikki Fragala Barnes is an arts and humanities scholar, concentrating on place-based public histories of vulnerable communities. Also a poet, Barnes is an instructor of Creative Writing at the University of Central Florida. Barnes serves on the Board of Directors for the LGBTQ History Museum of Central Florida. While earning her PhD in Texts and Technology, she also serves as the inaugural Bradley-Otis Fellow with the Rollins Museum of Art, designing its first comprehensive DEAI initiatives. Barnes’ work emphasizes critical making, public scholarship, and collaborative media.
Research interests include sites of memory, restorative historiographies, and digital deterioration. She serves as an Ethics Ambassador with UCF’s Center for Ethics, which works to integrate ethics within all areas of research.
Nikki Fragala Barnes (@bynikkibarnes) is also an editor, curator, and participatory installation artist.