Imperfection of Data: Interview with Sarah Groff Hennigh-Palermo
Tags: Design, Time, Art, Exhibition, Data Visualization

View of Neglect at Flux Gallery. Image by Jung In Jung.

Sarah Groff Hennigh-Palermo uses the aesthetics of data visualization to depict the quotidian lives of objects, specifically books. Her piece for Artificial Retirement, Neglect, is an installed library which features an abstracted measure of how (not) often its books are read. Pleas of “Read Me, Read Me” flash across the screen while vivid color bars fade away representing time. Inspired by the art of Stefanie Posavec and Giorgia Lupi, Groff Hennigh-Palermo’s work explores how data art can communicate the imprecise.

Groff Hennigh-Palermo has played with computers, art and data at the School For Poetic Computation and the Office for Creative Research. She is currently a master candidate at New York University’s Integrated Digital Media program.

Closeup of Neglect. Image by Jung In Jung.

This isn’t your first project using data visualization and your library. Can you tell us about the works leading up to Neglect?

It’s the third in a series of works asking questions about reversing the uses of data and sensors, making the former about emotions and the latter about helping objects express what they most want to instead of what we want.

The first piece in the series, Timeline of Neglect, plays with the form of a bar chart, with each bar falling to pieces as the book is ignored. The second, the Neo-Neglect brought the data collection into the real world. In this case, lightboxes alerted me to how the books were feeling and they could text or post to the web as well. In this case, I wanted the books and the view to be even closer together.

Snapshot of Timeline of Neglect. Image by SGHP.

I don’t usually associate data art with expressing imperfection. Why did you choose this medium for Neglect?

I’ve worked as a data and web designer in my day job for a few years now, and I have always been struck by the way engineers and scientists insist on the perfectibility and inherent truthfulness of data. In that world, imperfect data is just incomplete data and the dream of perfection is the dream of ever-present sensors, so we can have all the tiny bits of info and thereby mount the truth.

And I think this is all bananas.

Hennigh-Palermo’s Eyeo 2014 lightning talk.

But I love the form of data vis and the promise of sensors, so I wanted to do something with them that went again the standard narrative of their uses. Instead of working to make a milk carton tell us the milk is going bad, sensors can be used to tell us our books are lonely, maybe. Instead of recording numbers and locations, maybe a data visualization can help us feel the sadness of the books’ vitality ebbing away. (I did a lightning talk at Eyeo, too, about the way hole-y imperfect data can be a great subject for data visualization and generate a space we can project our imaginations into, like a novel.)

Overall, the question of imperfection is at the heart of data art. In the data community, sometimes people will call works that they find insufficiently rigorous or under-dedicated to pure communication “data art” as, like, an insult. It isn’t real vis because it cares about aesthetics or communicating somewhat emotionally. I want to put things into the world that stand against that.

Congratulations on your collection for Electric Objects! Can you share a bit on what it will be?

Thanks! The theme of this Art Club was “Bringing the Outside In” so I am doing five abstract data art pieces to bring outside data into frames and thereby into people’s living rooms. They use print techniques like half-toning, too, and pretty simple geometries. Since the EO1 frames sit in rooms all day, I am aiming for the pieces to be chill and pleasant and to match the kind of rooms I like looking at on, like, Apartment Therapy or SF Girl By Bay.

Work and Image by SGHP.

As a young artist, what do you plan to explore next?

Well I don’t quite feel done with the series yet. For instance, this iteration came out too literally. I wonder what it would be like with a more impressionistic visualization or without the metadata beneath.

More generally, I have the EO1 commission and I hope more shows in my future. It’s taken me a long time to feel okay calling myself an artist — now I’m just excited to make & show more. And of course I’m finishing up my thesis: I defend in December.

That project is (unsurprisingly!) about memory and data art. I’m building a system for collecting and reviewing memories inspired by Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. It’s meant to be a prototype for interacting with information in a different way. Feel free to follow along at my thesis process site.

Artificial Retirement is one of Flux Factory’s 2016 major exhibitions curated by Jung In Jung and Joelle Fleurantin.

Closing Event: September 11th 6pm with performances by Amelia Marzec and Robert Mayson, Openfield, Kat Sullivan, Sergio Mora-Diaz and Caitlin Sikora. AR is a Flux Factory major exhibition.