Over the past months I have gradually started to shift the way I think about data and information. Through this course I have discovered how important it is to look at the bigger picture; the influence of my decisions or those of the curator, but also the impact of subjectivity. Most importantly, this course has made me reflect upon my own approach to interpretation in various areas of my life. While reading articles in the news or in research I often think about what is not there, rather than what is, I think about what the curator chose to leave out, and what their reason for doing so might be. At the start of the semester we were confronted with the fact that data are shaped by the subjective decisions of the curator, as well as constraints presented by infrastructure [1]. Therefore through curation, data is always in some way biased, which directly influences the output of knowledge and our understanding of that knowledge [2]. However acknowledging that the process of curation inherently creates bias in the data wasn’t meant to make us think that all data is futile, rather it was for us to develop a more critical approach to how we understand it.

This exhibition will feature works throughout the semester, showing my process of curation by gathering data, categorizing and archiving, and finally visualizing datasets.