Isabel Hood’s practice explores the limitations of data as a tool for understanding a subject, and the way datasets can never adequately represent the complex and subjective realities of an individual’s existence. While traditional displays of data focus on efficient analysis and presentation, Hood’s work emphasises a slower engagement with information and atypical reporting metrics. Although her process of collection and display is subjective and defies the typical legibility tools of data visualisation, its speculative design nature recognises ideas of data re-ownership and emphasises the already inherent biased and flawed existence of current data collection and presentation processes.
Hood’s projection artwork, Data Capture: Four Days in May 2022 (2022), depicts a selection of days in which she captured personal data in May of this year. Recorded data is transformed into undulating vessels. In an attempt to grapple fleeting and ambiguous experiences, emotive data is modelled into something seemingly solid and tangible.
As well as recording moods, Hood’s collection process involves documenting her surroundings at the time of each recording using other qualitative methods of data collection, including photographing, painting, flatbed and 3D scanning. Collaged textures, patterns and objects, from the artist’s daily recordings, are translated into the digital space. They emerge incomplete, glitched and fragmented, as they are forced into the constraints and limitations of the data collection process.
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Isabel Hood is a digital artist and designer living and working in Meanjin/Brisbane. Her practice explores alternative approaches to data collection and display to question ideas of data ownership, vulnerability and the frequent decontextualisation of data in the process of its collection and visualisation. Hood completed a bachelor of Visual Communication at the Queensland College of Art in 2015, and a Fine Art Honours degree at the University of Tasmania, School of Creative Arts in Nipaluna/Hobart in 2019.
Image: Isabel Hood – Data Capture: Four Days in May 2022 (2022). (Video Still)
