Quantum oscillograph

Big Data have erupted in our daily lives. What are these big data, this artificial intelligence - with their promise of digital transformation - that we choose to fear and exalt in equal measure? In order to address these issues, we have translated them into a new concept, that of Datami: it helps us to think about them in all freedom, as a way of bringing these exalted subjects into our own more common life, closer to what we really want. We see the Datami as a virtual tatami, made of the data that we cherish, our data and those of our families and friends, our discoveries and curiosities, our roaming and conversations, all of these making up our new identities. In real life, our Datamis are being created with each new conversation, each interaction and each payment, our digital trail acquiring substance in the databases of all companies, big and small, digital or not. But these are our data that reflect our personal lives and we need them to practice our freedoms. That is why we conceive the Datami as a data tatami, a place of rest and repose against the digital onslaught, a maker-space of embodiment. It must help us restore our capacity to freely develop our expanding identities and claim our own digital trails. To investigate the emerging realities around us with all the powerful means of modern media – truly a paradise of information! There, discipline blends with intuition, science with art, imagination with rigour and image with meaning, all bundled into a new language of collaboration. Someone has invoked the term artonaut (Freddy Paul Grunert, 2018) to describe these new figures capable of straddling different disciplines and addressing our wicked problems, talking at once to scientific labs, industrial workshops and artistic imaginations. But we know this paradise is also flawed, a constrained surface, so our Datami must also become a shelter and a refuge against the data deluge, against fake news and the mounting fears for the digital transformation: eye of the storm, ataraxia in a digital whirlwind, harbinger of our digital declaration of independence, constituent of the Magna Carta of the Web that we all feel coming, as the winds of change also ruffle our digital lives. The challenge of the Resonances III on Big Data is to elaborate this personal Datami in a common endeavour with individual results, including the inevitable glitches of the digital, so that each of us can reap its benefits. This work must be able to conflate all disciplines and insights in a collective effort with a myriad of individual threads. It is not limited to art, or to science, or to policy, to culture or to society, but capable of englobing and connecting them all, dense in identity as any person walking in the street.

European Commission, Joint Research Centre, Eeckels, A., Fiordimela, C., Paul Grunert, F. et al., Resonances III – Datami, Eeckels, A.(editor), Fiordimela, C.(editor), Paul Grunert, F.(editor), Thielen-del Pozo, J.(editor), Publications Office of the European Union, 2024, https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2760/7364