Welcome. This blog constitutes production diary for the creation of “Methods for Misunderstanding the nature of things”.  The artwork is funded by Arts Council England. Through the blog I hope to capture the development of the project from idea to a finished artwork. Major contributors to the project are Rishii Chowdhury (tabla player), David Cotterrell (artist), Fareda Khan (freelance curator), Gurdeep Sian (cultural animateur), Khush Nubian (artist), Stella Couloutbanis (Freelance arts consultant and curator) and Sean Clark (creative technologist).

Data is all around us in everything we encounter through our senses.  Your eyes are taking in data as you read these paragraphs and the fact that you understand the rules of English enable you to parse these sentences.

My intention is to explore data flowing through situations and look how it mediates our relationship with technology.

There are many artists that have explored the fabrication of meaning through interpreting data including R. Luke DuBois who created the string composition titled “hard data” from data taken from the Iraq conflict.

Hard data: http://music.columbia.edu/~luke/projects/index.shtml?id=harddata

As a starting point, a software sketch has been developed that takes Tweets relating to a particular hashtag, splits up each letter (each of which is assigned a musical note using the tabla notation) and speaks back the assigned note to a tabla player.  For example “hello world” would become: “thaka, Ghee, khraana, khraana, Ghee, threke, Ghee, ghere naaga, khraana, Dhati” (just imagine it being spoken in a robotic voice). The tabla player would follow this notation and thus translate the tweet into tabla.

In essence we have taken data from a twitter feed and reinterpreted it in the medium of Tabla. The process after the data has been played by Rishii is what will be explored by this blog as the aim is to look at passing it through different scenarios by translating it using different pieces of hardware and software.

Ashokkumar Mistry

Artist