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Bridge Crossing is an art installation that comprises a physical installation, screen projection of digital images of 100 photos programmed to play in chronological order using Processing software in a computer, and audio recording from the Goodwill bridge crossing for the ambient sound. The physical installation is composed of 100 photos laser printed on transparent film sheets, framed with laser-cut clear acrylic sheets. These frames are suspended from the 8 meters long aluminum scaffold truss – a bridge-like structure itself – adjusted from the ceiling. The creative intention for this artwork was to explore visual anomalies as outliers through manually collected photographic data that reflect the artist’s experience of crossing the Goodwill Bridge in Brisbane, Australia. This experimental art practice started with the data collection of 100 digital photos taken by the artist between August 2018 and February 2019 during her regular commute walking across the Goodwill bridge toward Brisbane City. Bridge Crossing was presented as a part of the final exhibition, Seeking for Outliers, at The Block, Brisbane 2020 as the research outcome of PhD titled Seeking for Outliers: Artistic Exploration of Data Through Creative Practice, Faculty of Creative Industries at QUT.

Seeking for Outliers: Artistic Exploration of Data Through Creative Practice is a practice-led research journey that seeks for the outliers in data to drive art practice further conceptually through my motivation drawn from the insights into data bias and data subjectivity. Minorities in data sets are often left out and unrepresented from the collection and contextual process of data due to its anomalies. These become outliers. The outlier is an observation that is very different, abnormal or deviates from most of the remaining data by data scientists. Through this practice-led research, I extend the notion of the outlier to artistic and cultural understanding through this art practice. The data-driven digital art installations are presented together as immersive, live performative data-scape that are conceptualised under the active role of the practitioner. The creative works include four artworks to reflect insights into the artistic role of live data, redefining and reframing outliers through creative practice. I term this creative practice an artistic exploration of data, in which the artist conceives of data as material, medium and concept-driver. This exhibition is the creative works as the research outcome of Kim’s PhD titled as Seeking for Outliers: Artistic Exploration of Data Through Creative Practice.

Seeking for Outliers is a generative artwork driven by the artist's personal data downloaded from her Facebook wall posts for set times that she resided in two cities: Seoul and Brisbane. The installed system comprises a large screen, computer, Processing software application she created, and data downloaded from her Facebook account. In this installation, the words from her Facebook wall posts are aesthetically framed toward featuring the once-used words, instead of many-used words such as ‘Happy’- 400 times. This artwork visually expresses in the large screen full of thousands of words floating across the screen, moving toward one direction in different weights, sizes, colours, opacities, and speeds, according to its words counts. The artwork, Seeking for Outliers, has two different versions. The first version uses data from the artist’s ten-year period of residing in Seoul from March 2007 to February 2017, presented as a part of the exhibition, The Sense of Data, Platform-L, Seoul, Korea 2018. The final version was informed by personal data for the period of the artist’s residency in Brisbane from February 2017 to January 2020. It was presented as a part of the final exhibition, Seeking for Outliers at The Block, Brisbane 2020 as the creative research outcome for Kim’sa PhD titled Seeking for Outliers: Artistic Exploration of Data Through Creative Practice, Faculty of Creative Industries at QUT. The working version of Seeking for Outliers has been also presented as an artist talk at the 25th International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA 2019) held in Gwangju, South Korea 2019.

Artwork, BreatheOut, is a digital art installation with the live data, composed of a large screen, a wearable and a self-standing pole to collect audience’s breathing-out data using a microphone sensor. It visualises the live air quality data collected from Seoul Open Data portal streamed via the internet. A micro-controller(Arduino) processes the pole sensor data to mix a new layer of data visualisation from Brisbane air data into the screen as well as turning on LEDs on the cape according to the air quality data status. The patterns on both screen and wearable changes to green for being healthy; orange for being average; pink for being sensitive and unhealthy. On the side, a Mac computer is running in a custom software using Processing through datacook.org API for analysing, interpreting, and visualising the data on both wearable and screen. BreatheOut has three different versions. The first version was presented as a part of the exhibition, The Sense of Data, Platform-L, Seoul, Korea 2018. The second version was presented as a part of Robotronica 2019, Brisbane. The final version was presented as a part of the final exhibition, Seeking for Outliers, The Block, Brisbane 2020 as the research outcome of PhD, Seeking for Outliers: Artistic Exploration of Data Through Creative Practice, Creative Industries, QUT.

The Sense of Data series is the third data art series following series of Weight of Data 2016-8 and mood.cloud-Data as Art 2014. In the age of Big Data where our action, decisions, and opinions are digitally traced and hyper-connected in many digitally saturated societies, the artist questions about how our everyday lives are expressed and influenced through data. In this series, the artist visualises the live data of Korean selfie-related themes exposed in social media into the bold graphic pattern along with colourful lights embedded in wearable; visualises through an algorithm that uses Seoul City’s Open Data combined with two pieces of wearable; plays with an idea of her personal outliers that are left-out or unnoticed. Through this series, the artist begins to explore outliers of data through her art practice and aims to expand the use of real-time data as an art material for conceptual art practice. Total three digital art installations are presented during this exhibition from 7 November to 17 November 2018 in Seoul, South Korea. This solo exhibition is the first exhibition in the artist’s PhD research, “Seeking For Outliers: Artistic Exploration of Data Through Creative Practice”. The artists explores data as artistic material and medium through this exhibition.

“Weight of Data” is a series of the light art installations that has started with a question, ‘What value our digital and non-digital commodities represent for us in data?’ In order to make a sense of the value of data-driven virtual commodity into artworks, the artist decided to measure the value of a cryptocurrency into the weight of physical, edible commodities - rice, sugar and salt. Each artwork of this series is composed with 1 Kg of each agricultural raw product with embedded electronic parts. These selected commodities are valuable as being essential for human survivals and they used to function as a currency traded in history. Each artwork displays transformative light patterns in vivid colors through an algorithm that calculates the value of single cryptocurrency into the weight of each commodity value. It refreshes every 2 minutes in real-time along with the numeric ticker on screen that represents for the weight increase or decrease in correlation with the value of cryptocurrency against each commodity. With the embedded layers of cultural and historical context of these commodities, the artist asks an open question on the current issues of data by contrasting tangible ancient currency against virtual new currency.

In this workshop we propose to explore new approaches to bring about real environmental change by looking at the success of empowering technologies that enable grassroots activism and bottom up community participation. Ubiquitous computing is transforming from being mostly about professional communication and social interaction to a sensor rich personal measurement platform that can empower individuals and groups to gain an awareness of their surroundings, engage in grassroots activism to promote environmental change, and enable a new social paradigm – citizen science. This workshop brings together fresh ideas and approaches to help elevate individuals to have a powerful voice in society, to act as citizen scientists, and collectively learn and lobby for change worldwide.