What do you experience as 'data' in your organisational life? In mine it manifests through multi-channels: email, webinars, podcasts, SMS, What's App, Huddle, Chatter, Collaborate, Lync, intranet and internet searches, hyperlinks to shared files, linked-in, twitter, dropbox, Trello, Microsoft Office (Windows 7 Enterprise), print, info graphics, data visualisations. I'm not sure if I've named them all, and I use others in my non-work life. So, all told I have a lot of technology enabled data interaction. In both my work and non-work lives I'm constantly interpreting and making sense (or trying to) of this data 'tsunami'.
'Tsunami'– related to 2.5 quintillion bytes of data we create globally every day is one of the words explored in Big Bang Data a London exhibition in which 'Artists and designers help us understand our brave new world'. What I understood pretty much as soon as I'd seen the first installation was that I know nothing that goes on behind the scenes to bring this data to my fingertips.
You walk in and see a vast triptych video– no people in it at all. It 'documents one of the largest, most secure and 'fault-tolerant' data-centres in the world, run by Telefonica in Alcalá, Spain' and aims to 'look beyond the childish myth of 'the cloud', to investigate what the infrastructures of the internet actually look like'.