Zachęta – National Gallery of Art

artist: Anna Barlik
architect: Marcin Strzała
curator: Jacek Sosnowski
producer: Michał Kubiak
executive project: Mariusz Wrona, Robert Kinaszewski, Wojciech Radłowski
production and installation: Michał Nęcek and Mateusz Liskiewicz, Marcin Nęcek, Mateusz Nęcek
curator’s assistants: Sonia Jaszczyńska, Maja Sałek
research: Kinga Kotlińska

All of us are made up of data. Digital information has become our main tool for interacting with reality, and in many cases, it has become reality itself. The Datament exhibition presented at the Polish Pavilion for the 18th International Architecture Exhibition, illustrates the contemporary relationship between people and data, and how the latter is processed. The neologism of the title identifies data as the establishment, stressing its tangible and seldom questioned impact on our lives.

This sculpture, which entirely fills the space of the Polish Pavilion, was created with an algorithm whose point of departure was widely available statistical data on states and territories from around the world. The installation is made up of four steel reticular models, transferred directly from the digital environment, depicting algorithmically generated statistical homes from Hong Kong, Poland, Mexico, and Malawi. Each model is made up of four spaces, corresponding to the basic functions of a flat. While based on the authority of statistics harvested from official sources, the resulting picture of the world is equally credible and false. This is how datament manifests itself – filling every cognitive gap with alleged knowledge.

The installation uses the language of architecture to contend with the omnipresence of data through physical experience, tangibly demonstrating how the scale of accumulated unprocessed data demands we form a wholly new relationship with it. A relationship that will help us to grasp and minimize the errors it contains, resulting from the incompatibility of the human perspective with the logic of the algorithm.