The interview is from A&B issue 6|23
The watchword of this year's 18th International Architecture Biennale in Venice is „Laboratory of the Future” (the exhibition, curated by Lesley Lokko, runs from May 20 to November 26, 2023).
The team responsible for the „Datament” exhibition in the Polish Pavilion is made up of artist Anna Barlik, architect Marcin Strzała and curator Jacek Sosnowski. Together they prepared a project illustrating the danger hidden in an uncritical approach to the world of data, which seems to be infallible.
Jacek Sosnowski—curator and producer. Graduate of cultural studies at the Institute of Polish Culture at Warsaw University and art history at Collegium Civitas. Since 2009 he has been running the Propaganda Foundation and the Propaganda gallery in Warsaw. He was the curator of the Dom Development City Art Foundation, where he carried out more than a dozen art projects in the space of newly built housing estates. Since 2015, he has been a co-organizer of Warsaw Gallery Weekend. In 2012-2015, he realized the project Martin Scorsese Presents: Masterpieces of Polish Cinema.
Anna Barlik—visual artist working with space and local contexts, in her works she explores the spatial relationship between humans and the surrounding reality. She is a graduate of the Faculty of Textile and Clothing at the Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź, the Faculty of Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and postgraduate studies in urban planning and spatial management at the Warsaw University of Technology. She has held artistic residencies in Finland and Iceland. She is a lecturer at the Faculty of New Media Art at the Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology, where she teaches composition and visual structures and runs a sculpture studio.
Marcin Strzała—designer, architect exploring the transdisciplinary nature of architecture in the digital age. Graduate of the Faculty of Architecture at the Warsaw University of Technology. He taught at Monash Art, Design and Architecture in Melbourne and Xi "an University of Architecture and Technology in China. He lectures on the digital paradigm in design at the School of Form at SWPS University and the Faculty of Architecture at the Warsaw University of Technology. Her academic work explores the relationship between digital data and its physical representation in architecture.
Anna Walewska:What's happening in Venice?
Anna Barlik:We are in the editing stage. We are finishing and we are satisfied.
Anna W.:What awaits the audience at the Polonia Pavilion?
Anna B.:Almost 7 tons of steel sculpture, which is a reflection on how much data we produce. We analyzed it for several months. Different countries, regions produce different quality of data. The sculpture is a physical experience of this phenomenon.
The Polish Pavilion in Venice
Photo: Jacopo Salvi (altomare.studio)
Jacek Sosnowski: We want to show architecture in the pavilion, not just talk about it. It is an architecture that was created based on statistics obtained from publicly available sources. We created the form using algorithms and computations we developed. It has, as Anna mentioned, a sculptural form—this is the best way to describe what is in the Pavilion. It is a spatial, visual and bodily experience at the same time as architecture. We present four models of apartments showing four levels of data saturation. We chose Hong Kong, Poland, Mexico and Malawi. The mesh models representing them are superimposed on each other and form a kind of impossible comparativeness, a labyrinth. That is, it is also, one might say, a kind of 3D infographic that doesn't inform about anything, or at least doesn't do so explicitly. We are not trying to show that there is some very objective truth behind the data. We go in a slightly different direction. We are saying that data and the scale of data production in today's world is downright frightening, overwhelming. We are not advocating the abandonment of advanced computing or databases, however, we should endow this digital world with a more critical eye and give it far less credit. From the data on the Internet, statistical data, we cannot produce a true picture of the world.
Anna B.:Because it can be manipulated very easily.
Jacek:And we manipulate this data, because this is also the nature of data, that in every database, in every matrix, there are holes, errors, distortions, simplifications, and every successive processing of this data in very strange ways removes these errors, introduces new ones, amplifies them, creates a kind of mutation.
The Polish Pavilion in Venice
Photo: Jacopo Salvi (altomare.studio)
Anna W.: For me, data, algorithms are also completely immaterial. And we are talking about an object, as if pure matter enclosed in this Pavilion. What does it mean that you guys produced the data?
Marcin Strzała:We are all data, we all overproduce data. As the authors of this sculpture, we do not generate data, we benefit from its ubiquity. Statistics show that from 2021 to 2024, that is, in three years, we will produce a total of twice as much data in the world as from the invention of writing to 2021. Among other things, this includes what your computer is doing right now, what your cell phone is doing, how Google personalizes ads and Instagram adjusts suggested content. This is happening all the time and these are hidden computing, it is called ubiquitous computing.
The Polish Pavilion in Venice
Photo: Jacopo Salvi (altomare.studio)
Jacek: There are very many computers thinking about you at any given moment.
Marcin: There are simultaneous computing to cope with processing and managing information. Where there is so much data that it escapes our perception, where we are limited because we don't have enough fingers to count something. If we have five oranges, we have five oranges, and if we have twenty oranges, we start stacking them in boxes of five to know how many boxes of oranges we have, and so on. We literally do this with all information that touches our lives, which we refer to directly in the Pavilion, if only by ranking regions, countries in the world, according to how much and what data to our knowledge they produce. We also checked for which ones we have information on the average area of housing. Let me use a somewhat anecdotal comparison: because someone counted that you and your dog each have three legs, it was determined that shoes should be sold at three each, not two. It illustrates that decisions with very real consequences are made based on various statistical calculations. Since we wanted to confront our viewers with the reality of the problem, these figures we present in our installation are just the average housing in various places around the world. Also with how much by using a deliberately incorrect design algorithm we are able to show these averages in a distorted mirror. Let's assume that there is a representation of a Polish apartment in the Pavilion. We have calculated that the average kitchen has an area of, let's say, 7.5 square meters, therefore, with full knowledge of the consequences, this kitchen is 7.5 meters by 1 meter wide. It is therefore a very long, non-functional sausage. Ergonomics lies, but statistically and with data, everything agrees.
Anna B.: We are touching on the broad topic of collecting, processing and using data, while at the Architecture Biennale we refer directly to housing figures.
Jacek: Which, for example, are a distortion of statistics or do not participate in the censuses in Poland.
The Polish Pavilion in Venice
Photo: Jacopo Salvi (altomare.studio)
Anna B.: Above all, we want our viewer, the viewer at the Biennale, not to get lost in the huge amount of numbers and information, as we did when preparing the competition project. We tried to work out how statistics, figures, information work so well. We even had some conversations about it with the GPT chat room. We tested what it's like to experience a great deal of information, which is coming in all the time. This is the experience when we enter the sculpture. I feel that it's saturating and I think the viewer will feel it.
Jacek: There are high hopes for data analysis and so on. We are not against the data in any way, we just postulate a kind of vigilance about our relationship. Sensitivity about what kind of relationship we have with this data. To what extent do we believe that this data does not lie, that it tells the truth at all, to what extent and how often do we use a certain kind of data as a code word: the data says that.... Vigilance regarding our tendency to believe that the more of something there is, the better it is, to a kind of inflation that if something is, for example, clicked on much more often on the Internet, it is more valuable. We also say that if we reduce our experience of architecture to data, we will unbelievably impoverish our actual experience of architecture and make our lives very impoverished or more difficult than they are now, while the hope is quite the opposite. One can even say that this kind of impoverished experience is the Pavilion experience.
The Polish Pavilion in Venice
Photo: Jacopo Salvi (altomare.studio)
Marcin: There is an intentional aesthetic so that, for example, a group of, let's call them professionals, who have been in contact with any architectural modeler, or in fact any early 3D visualization, will recognize a certain graphic language. If you assume that what you see on a computer screen is a representation of future reality, then our sculpture is a physical representation of that digital representation.
Jacek: De facto, what is in the Pavilion is an architecture built simply from basic data. We told the machine: please, this is the set of information we have, keep doing it. As a result, it's a house that has no windows, no handles, no architectural detail there, so until the viewer finds a place where it's already explicitely said which model belongs to which state, it's impossible to decode.
Marcin: Quite the same way we have a problem talking about why „Datament” looks the way it does and not the way it does. A theme that has come up quite often is that because there is so much data, information and issues, then, like you do now, we all expect an immediate answer and what follows. We rarely go deeper, to the sources of the data, to the methodologies of data acquisition and interpretation. Because of this, we are susceptible to manipulation from the way this data is presented. We build our picture of reality on this basis. Back to the architectural context. Since everyone has already accepted that there is no architecture without a computer, the word „optimization” has made a great career in architectural discourse. Buildings are optimized, sunlight is optimized, landscaping is optimized, and so on. For a long time it was a key word that caused us to no longer discuss architecture in terms of beauty, goodness and truth, because, after all, optimal things must not be discussed.
The Polish Pavilion in Venice
Photo: Jacopo Salvi (altomare.studio)
Jacek: Another example in the discourse on architecture is that on the one hand we have path-developers and on the other patoactivists. One and the other use data to sell, let's call it, their version of the truth. Some, using different types of data, such as commuting time to the center or just the areas of apartments, will present it as an attractive parameter of a given development, while others will talk about the number of trees that will be cut down or moved. From the same data, we can create two different facts that are equally true. For example, if we take the data on trees, at this point, based on very precise satellite images of the entire surface of the Earth, we know that the world has the most trees in the history of our civilization. At the same time, using the same data, we know that deforestation is continuing on a catastrophic scale. That is, if one were to persist, we could say that yes, our cities have never been so green. At the same time, we are cutting down forests at a massive rate. Such a danger is hidden in artificial intelligence data, and we don't quite know how this reality we are to study in „Laboratory of the Future” is created.
Anna B.: Humans will say „I don't know.” More and more often we turn on critical thinking and say „the data lies.” A computer will not say „I don't know.” He will hallucinate that he knows, even that he knows for sure, and this is already dangerous. What is important is the attentiveness of a person to discover this.
Jacek:This is the difference in the basic perception of the world: how a machine perceives the world and how a human perceives the world. The machine always divides the world into smaller pieces. This is the nature of data. Data is numerical, there is always some level of simplification so that it can be computerizable. We can increase the resolution of the analysis and the precision of the data, but they will always work in a finite way. Reason, on the other hand, works very differently. It thinks in a kind of continuity and discontinuity. Our perception of the world is primarily determined by our limitations. We think where the inside begins, where the outside ends, where our hand ends and begins. We measure the world with our body. This is what Martin often points out—we are used to simple computations, but also using, for example, our body or the fingers of two hands, we are able to make even very complex calculations. The machine has no limitation, and as a result, it combos in different places than we do. We are aware of our lack and know that we are acting in a creative way. The machine has only some semblance of creativity. It is a mimicry of our way of working, not something produced from scratch.
Anna W.: Data will be found for everything. Data for this can still be manipulated. They also govern themselves somehow and generate themselves. Thus, the basic concepts of truth do not exist. If this core is not there, it seems that perhaps the world has already ended?
Marcin: Since call Lesley Lokko speaks of Africa as the youngest continent, it is also in the context of positing a thesis of attentiveness that we try to avoid a narrative that says we have data, that we know, that statistics show, that we have projects and solutions. We have data, but that doesn't mean we know. We don't want to practice knowledge colonialism, that here we have identified needs, solved problems, or that we have ready answers precisely because we have already checked, already counted. Rather, we are pointing out this danger and that we need to work on these things from the bottom up, vernacular.
The Polish Pavilion in Venice
Photo: Jacopo Salvi (altomare.studio)
Anna B.: On the other hand, there is a huge inattention to information processing. Africa, which we are discussing here, is huge and has very diverse architecture, climate zones, inhabitants, and lumping the entire continent together is such an inattentive processing of information. Averaged data is responsible for reproducing stereotypes, and in many areas we have become accustomed to this and so divide the world. Meanwhile, we have different standards of living, different sizes of housing, and different statistics about it.
Jacek: Very often there is a narrative that the European Union is straightening bananas. This is an illusion of homogeneity. In construction, this is most evident. Europe has one current, but many kinds of plugs. When we talk about Africa, actually, in terms of data, we don't know what Africa's surface area is, because you can count the surface area of a sphere in different ways, and it's quite a large continent. We don't know how many people live in Africa. In Europe, we are much more precise. In Africa, the lack of precision is statistically very significant.
Anna B.:A certain discourse has arisen around „Datament”, which we are conducting here and want to continue. First of all, we encourage the audience to reflect, because perhaps we are asking ourselves the wrong questions and processing wrongly the information that we keep overproducing. And this is perhaps the most serious challenge for the „Laboratory of the Future”—To deal with the excess of data, so as not to succumb to its dictatorship.
Jacek:It seems to me that the best proof of how „Datament” works is that the vast majority of investments always exceed their budget. Why? Especially in tenders organized by the state, the city, institutions, where it is quite transparent. The budget is always exceeded, even though all the terms of the tender were known beforehand and everything was predictable. After all, this is a finite matter, so to speak, and always this budget has to be tweaked for the thing to happen at all.
The Polish Pavilion in Venice
Photo: Jacopo Salvi (altomare.studio)
Marcin: Among people dealing with the digital paradigm in architecture, there is a statement recurring like a mantra by Cedric Price, who in 1966, at the beginning of the digital revolution, said: „technology is the answer, but what was the question?”.
Anna W.: What you are talking about is contemporary, it is real, it is all visible and surrounds us.
Anna B.: We will leave the reception of art to the attentiveness and sensitivity of the viewer, who may more or less decode „Datament”. We reckon that some people simply won't go into it as deeply as we go into it. On the other hand, it would be nice if we started talking about how much data is produced today and for what purpose.
Marcin: The sculpture is designed in such a way that it corresponds to this experience that you can have in any relationship with data. You enter the pavilion and the first impression you will have is information overload, a cacophony. Then, after a few minutes, you start to recognize shapes and colors. This is blue, this is pink, this is square and this is rectangular. You perceive that they are somehow related to each other, you start to form a picture, and you get the sense that you understand what's going on. And then another, third stage, as you analyze what surrounds you a while longer and you start to see that you recognize these places, you know it's a bedroom, but there's something wrong with it, the ceiling should be upstairs, not downstairs.
The Polish Pavilion in Venice
Photo: Jacopo Salvi (altomare.studio)
Anna W.: What will the future look like, if this data, which currently generates everything, is so selective, selective and does not take into account so many aspects?
Jacek: This is, after all, a kind of feedback all the time. Ultimately, we have our wits about us, and we orient ourselves when we stumble. Next time we will try not to stumble.
The data won't plant our feet yet in a physical way. We have just these architectural and physical limitations all the time. We adapt and adapt the space to us. Plus there are changes that are unpredictable or chaotic. The modern belief that everything is quantifiable and it is possible that we will be closer to the truth by knowing, by collecting more information about this world, is very illusory. That's why British researcher James Bridle says we are entering another Middle Ages. Our dark age is such that we don't know, we don't see the world as it is, but we also don't see what this world produced in the data is like.
Anna W.: I think maybe this is the point where we differ. If I understand you correctly, however, you assume that humans are critical and reflective, while I think the opposite.
Marcin: I'm immediately reminded of all those memes circulating among architects like a staircase going into a blind wall, or a hole in the ceiling that in the drawing was an inspection cloud. These are witty images of that lack of vigilance you speak of, which we want to conquer through this experience. It is very easy for any of us to be deceived. We need to be more vigilant about this world, because most of the time our image about it is no longer based on our own experience. Your living space has expanded considerably, if only through the Internet, and this image of reality that you draw from it is also created in some way by someone. Our sculpture is algorithmically generated. The program has taken, processed and projected the data, only that in the end a specific person is behind this piece of intentionally badly done code, and therefore indirectly behind the result. The same is true of the artificial intelligence that everyone is so excited about. Behind artificial intelligence, too, are the people who programmed it and the databases on which they trained it.
Anna W.: Well, that's right, because the key issue here is the question of human intentions, which still has an impact on the process. I, unfortunately, do not believe that they are good. At least in most cases, because what rules this world, however, is cash. Going back to the project—how did you come together for this task and how did you divide your roles?
Jacek: This is a nice romantic story. We have been working with Ania for very many years. It was both Ania's and my dream to realize an exhibition at the Polish Pavilion. We talked about making some kind of proposal and then, by chance, Ania met her childhood friend from elementary school, who professionally deals in the field of architecture with what we had been discussing for some time. We got incredibly lucky, because since we won, the discussion of the problem of data, computing, artificial intelligence has gained momentum and it is a very timely topic.
Anna B.: Each of the three of us represents his field. Marcin teaches architecture, Jacek is a curator, I'm a sculptor and I teach sculpture, composition, visual structures. So Marcin was from counting and developing algorithms, I created a sculpture that is a visual concept of architectural reality processed by artificial intelligence, and Jacek, as a curator, deals with narration. We are such a dragon with three heads. Individual elements sometimes stick out.
The Polish Pavilion in Venice
Photo: Jacopo Salvi (altomare.studio)
Anna W.: Let's talk about the visual layer and the entry of data into this area. Tell us, please, about this experience from your side. What did it look like and what kind of challenge was it?
Anna B.:We all experience an excess and cacophony of information, including in the space around us. My sculptures are usually firmly anchored in the city space, and I like to refer to architecture in them. „Datament” creates a thoroughly architectural sculpture, whose viewer has the opportunity to „immerse” themselves in data by experiencing a space dominated by the various algorithms that plan housing today. We enter something that is a kind of labyrinth, an arrangement of verticals, levels, rhythms in which we get lost. We invite the audience to participate in this experience. Six people can enter the installation at a time to look at it from a different perspective. The overlapping structures are the overlapping data of average apartments in different countries. I like to use bold colors in my art. This sculpture is painted in four contrasting, ultramatte colors that have a light blik of 3-5 percent, so they also give a kind of computer experience because they are so synthetic. We also took advantage of the natural lighting from the large skylight in the Polish Pavilion, inviting the Italian sun inside, which has an amazing effect.
Jacek:The narrative that the exhibition has the potential to produce is unbelievably multifaceted. It seems to me that this is the greatest strength of this project. Our fear in this context is that all that we are talking about now is present in the Pavilion, but invisible. What is in the Pavilion is a kind of example, a distillate of everything we can talk about. We're getting to a situation where we're talking about such basic things, concepts, such a basic fabric of our now anthropomasinology, that it's either big books or the simplest elements. In the Pavilion it is very clear in the sense that it is very simple. If someone is unreflective, they will just see colorful forms....
Anna B.: Even if someone will perceive the installation purely in aesthetic or architectural terms, that's fine too. However, it seems that the subject of using large amounts of collected data is currently the hottest issue concerning all aspects of our lives, not only architecture, but civilization in general, because it raises both hope for the progress of humanity and anxiety as to whether we are definitely heading in the right direction.
The Polish Pavilion in Venice
Photo: Jacopo Salvi (altomare.studio)
Marcin: This is the plan, so that this reflection will stay with us longer. We also didn't want to start from a position of authority, we wanted to avoid a situation where we would say „here's our theory, and here's a catalog for 50 euros where you can read about our stream of consciousness.” We've known for a long time that we wouldn't be publishing any catalog. There will only be a short note in the pavilion, the website will expand on the content aspects. In fact, we want the „Datament” exhibition and the definition that Jacek formulated to be a starting point for a broader discussion in various curatorial-artistic-architectural circles. So that it would be an invitation to reflections by many theoreticians and practitioners, which we could publish as a compilation laboriously called "Datament Dictionary."
Anna B.: With the opening of the Polish Pavilion, we are opening a very broad discussion about datament. We will certainly want to invite participation in such a dialogue.
Jacek: We have made a very modern Pavilion. Modern not only because it deals with data, something very technological, but also in terms of what kind of exhibition, curatorial, artistic or even architectural strategy it is. Unlike many pavilions, we don't appear from a position of knowledge. What we are saying to the viewer is that we feel similarly lost in this relationship, that this is the situation around the data, and now the responsibility lies with all viewers.
Anna W.: Thank you for the interview.
interviewed: Anna WALEWSKA
Photo: Jacopo Salvi (altomare.studio)
Illustrations provided courtesy of the Zachęta National Gallery of Art.
