What is Data?

1. What is Data?
An Existential [but useful] Exploration

2. “Russell Foltz-Smith”
• Self Appointed Artist
• Green Eyes, Red Head
• 5’10”, 243lbs
• 22 tattoos
• Married, 2 kids
• @UChicago Math BA
• 43 Theater Shows
• Son
• 42 moves, 5 states
Finance
Developer
Product, BI
VP Product
VP Tech, Content
CTO
Biz Dev
President
SVP, Data

3. In place of facts, we now live in a world of data. Instead of
trusted measures and methodologies being used to produce numbers, a dizzying array of numbers is produced by default, to be mined,
visualised, analysed and interpreted however we wish. If risk modelling (using notions of statistical normality) was the defining research
technique of the 19th and 20th centuries, sentiment analysis is the defining one of the emerging digital era. We no longer
have stable, ‘factual’ representations of the world, but unprecedented new capacities to
sense and monitor what is bubbling up where, who’s feeling what, what’s the general vibe.
Financial markets are themselves far more like tools of sentiment analysis (representing the mood of investors) than producers of ‘facts’. This is why it was so absurd to
look to currency markets and spread-betters for the truth of what would happen in the referendum: they could only give a sense of what certain people at felt would happen
in the referendum at certain times. Given the absence of any trustworthy facts (in the form of polls), they could then only provide a sense of how investors felt about
Britain’s national mood: a sentiment regarding a sentiment. As the 23rd June turned into 24th June, it became manifestly clear that prediction markets are little more than
an aggregative representation of the same feelings and moods that one might otherwise detect via twitter. They’re not in the
business of truth-telling, but of mood-tracking.
-Will Davies (http://www.perc.org.uk/project_posts/thoughts-on-the-sociology-of-brexit/)

4. Data is.
There exists data about
everything and anything.
Including data.
Data is relational residue.

5. Data About Other
Specific Data Types Specific Detectors

6. Data As Other.
Organs – rendered data by 3d printers
Surrealism turned real.
Old Master Painters reanimated as New Master Data Scientists
Interiors augmented.
Weapons are just printed data.

7. Data As Detector
Generalized DetectorsGeneralized Data
Networks are DATA and DETECTOR.

8. Data As Complex Recursion
(w. errors)Gene replication.
Error Data is the animating aspect of evolution and learning.
Printers Printing Printers Printing Printers…
&
All complex processes produce mutations (errors, residue).
(halting problem)

9. Data As Marks in a substrate.
Differences in a medium. Transmittable Marks.
The pages of words and
music and math symbols
are just ordered marks.
They are data in a huge number of
different ways.
 Linear codex of left to right
English writing
 Musical Notation
 Mathematical Symbols
 Music and Math Theories
 The words definitions
 …
A detector needs context/previous
exposure to this data as well as use
of the data through other detectors
to understand/interpret this data.
(play music on a musical
instrument...)

10. Data As Maps.
(Projective Geometry)
Data maps mediums
between mediums.
The world’s resources
are controlled by
projection maps.
High dimensional data
(complex real world stuff)
requires topological
approaches for any
sense.

11. Data Becomes Through Experimentation.
Data isn’t data until something
happens....
Emmer wheat… mutated into big seeds
that found reasonable ground… got
noticed by some Neolithic folks… and
then civilization happened.
Gravitational waves aren’t
data until something really
big happens, like a couple
of blackholes getting
together.
… and there’s a detector to detect it.

12. Data is:
About Others and Itself
Of Relations
Relates Others To Others
Becomes Through
Experiment
Learning is Noticing and Experimenting with Difference.
(What was that glitch? Is that glitch a glitch in other mediums?)
Data Science is Experimentation
Simulation
Art
Transmitting Phenomena From One Medium to Another
and testing to see what maintains coherence, meaning, use.
Data that is really data is ROBUST through media.

13. Art is The Future of Data Science (always has been)
Art is about making something happen.
Noticing what’s noticed.
Recursing noticing & happening.
1203
painting
s
2
art
shows
13
hrs of
video
155
sale
s
+38%
single day
revenue increase
for show locations
14,000,000
+
marks
Analyze all my marks.
Analyze all show behavior

14. Do people want to learn about the Self or the Truth?
But! Truth had pull! 90% of humans are right
handed/footed (ants are left first biased too!).
73%73%73% 27%

15. All Businesses Are Art
Business as Art As Data Science
If a business produces
something robust, it will
transmit across mediums.
And this exercise is getting
really complicated.

16. It really is about noticing...
… the ever changing relationships
between things.

17. Another Surprising Example of
Noticing
...a new product in video/tv content is to ACCELERATE the viewing
speed.

18. Dilemma.
How do you QA
and do data in
an infinite
virtual world?
How do you QA
and ensure safety
in infinite live
video?
“What might just happen is the proliferation of archi-tectural clones
around the globe, of transparent, interactive, mobile, fun buildings
modeled on networks and virtual realities—by which a whole society
basically gives itself the comedy of culture, the comedy of communication,
the comedy of the virtual (just as it gives itself the comedy of politics, for
that matter). “
Architecture: Truth or Radicalism?
by Jean Baudrillard

19. Data Science is Simulation is Art.
We will assess CONSEQUENCES through
integrated simulations of new relationships
deployed in virtual reality with complex adaptive
avatars.
• Unsupervised learning driven avatars in virtual universes trying out our ideas
• Instigating and Tracking behavior… “Virtual Skinner Boxes”
• Assessments of Acceptable Risk Networks lead to adoption and integration of
policy/tech/software from the virtual to the real

21. Insight from noticing what’s
noticed.
We make data detectors. We detect data. We publish data to be detected.
http://datalooksdope.com/

22. Hadoop is essential.
Hadoop (the ecosystem) remains
the most generalized collection of data detectors.

23. Machine Learners
SOME EXPERIENCE

24. Thank
You
Business:
www.fabricinteractive.com/casezero
Displeasure:
@un1crom (on instagram and twitter)
Criticism:
www.worksonbecoming.com