datastasis
[…] Insofar as the oncological disease in Konieczna’s work is shown from an individual, personal perspective, the interactive installation by N.C. Honghoon Chung, Alejandro Van Zandt-Escobar and Alperen Şahin is based on cancer metadata. By showing the subsequent steps in the search for patterns in growing datasets, the artists point to a paradoxical situation: an increase in the amount of incomplete information makes it more complicated to discover significant relationships. datastasis is an interactive audiovisual environment based on The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), which contains genetic data for thousands of patients broken down into 32 different types of cancer. Over 600 million data points are used to compute higher and lower level feature sets specifically designed to provide a multi-modal immersive experience. In their raw form, numeric values in TCGA data are largely indistinguishable from noise. When machine learning is employed to cluster this data, aesthetically and dynamically diverse patterns emerge. These patterns or their lack are linked to algorithmic visualisation and generative soundscape. By entering the installation space, viewers influence the sorting algorithm by randomly transforming the audiovisual environment. datastasis, which highlights the depersonalised perspective of research that transforms a sick individual into a chaotic set of data describing the disease entity, crowns the part of the exhibition devoted to the medical aspects of the concealed. In medicine, “concealment” is a term that can be used to describe the failure to provide information or evidence, for example concerning a disease. However, at this exhibition, searching for what is developing but not yet revealed goes beyond individual therapy. Concealed concerns space, history, identity, desires, fears, past and future. It is an attempt to see the hidden truths and lies in interwoven stories and pinpoint premonitions and fears while trying to see that which remains to be seen. […]
Małgorzata Miśniakiewicz: Concealed. In: Art Reviev SURVIVAL 17. Catalogue, Wrocław 2019, p. 90-91.
photo: Małgorzata Kujda
