Data Mining / RYBN collective

Since the end of the Eighties, the Data Mining technologies have been used in order to increase the profit of commercial and financial activities. Nowadays, they are used by many other activities, such as humanitarian missions, research, intelligence and security agencies, etc... The development of this practice in several fields whose finality is not only economic, is symptomatic of the tendency to turn more effective a society economisation phenomenon.

The rise of this tool also coincides with the digital data amount exponential increase, due to a growing digitalization use, and Internet proliferation use (continuous flows, growing storage spaces, compression formats). However, these virtual datas are digital transations of economic, social and/or political movements. But their always growing use has generated a new opacity, making them far less readable.

In this context the RYBN collective has undertaken a Data Mining based research project, since March 2006, in order to create several artistic pieces of work. Diverted from their original goals, Data Mining tools and Digital Monitoring technologies are used in order to create a series of images of our society, pictured through its data flows. The resulting digital visualizations are based on cartographic principles, and are real-time updated.

Anti Data Mining is both an artistic research, a socio-economic and a geopolitical investigation, as well as a real-time archaeology process focusing on the data flows which acompose a part of our contemporary society.