Hannah Rubin

California Institute of the Arts Main Gallery, 2017

Data Display Site #1 is a sound art piece that began in July 2017 while at residency at Dusklit at the Seligman Performing Art Center in upstate New York. It is a work-in-progress that mutates during each iteration — and is a continuing, and evolving, investigation of the relationship between surveillance, consent, and power through the staging of various anachronistic (& private) interactions in public spaces.

The piece, in its first iteration (in upstate NY), consisted of a demarcated tent space inwhich participants where invited to enter, so long as they followed the contractual rules posted at the entrance: agree to be recorded, agree to remain in the tent for the entire duration of the length of a cassette tape, agree to read the Data Love Notes that were scattered around the tent out loud at some point while in the tent.

In this iteration, as Data Display Site #1, I presented the collected data recordings for gallery listening as physical objects of vulnerable accumulation — a series of marked cassette tapes. The audio shrine stands next to a framed Data Love Note and the Terms and Conditions that dictated the legal collecting of the presented data.