Data Deluge, an exhibition at Ballroom Marfa curated by Rachel Gugelberger and Reynard Loki, consists of a loosely organized set of works concerned with information and its relationship to time. As the curators outline in the press release, the show is a portrait of artists who work with data to generate art. The exhibition spans the past twenty years1 with a quick nod to the 1960s when information sciences was an emerging field.2

Attempting to understand financial interactions through geological time, three large-scale photographs by Michael Najjar employ the history of the sublime through an index with the radical fluctuations of the global financial markets.3 While on a climbing expedition on Mt. Aconcagua, the highest peak in the Western and Southern hemispheres, the artist took the photograph nasdaq_80-09 (2008-2010). The photograph looks up at Mt. Aconcagua from an adjacent and slightly lower point. The land Najjar stood upon cuts across the lower third of the photograph while Mt. Aconcagua rises behind and extends into a series of attenuated peaks. In the background, the surrounding range stretches out before disappearing into the clouds, the grand accumulation of a tectonic history. Because the photograph’s title implies the accumulation of nearly thirty years of daily trading (between 1980 and 2009) the main ranges’ silhouettes seem to parallel the fluctuations of the stock market. The overwhelming scale of the landscape begins to represent the incomprehensible flows of wealth throughout almost thirty years of recent trading. As we face the sublime impossibility of understanding the billion-year history that led to the mountain’s enormity, we likewise face the impossibility of knowing the vast spikes in financial trading that occur within our lifetime.

Adjacent to Najjar’s work, Rebeca Bollinger’s Alphabetically Sorted (1994) similarly makes a historical reference as it deals with new technologies. The video, which runs on a single television, depicts a vertically scrolling and alphabetized list of words read through a digital recording of a woman’s voice. For the most part the words are sexual, though other less suggestive words appear. Paired with the digital voice, the alphabetical sorting and the brisk and regular pacing of the reading flatten the sexual tone of the majority of the words. Yet the list, culled from frequent search terms for images of women on the Internet, along with the female voice, situates the video within the historical power dynamic of voyeurship—namely the male gaze—suggesting that the same gendered viewership governs the present technology.

Works such as Bollinger’s and Najjar’s suggest a reorientation to time, characterizing time as the rapid accumulation of data. The works draw from the locus of points which ground us in a specific place (i.e., stock market fluctuations or search terms), and which would otherwise take a greater amount of time to observe, allowing events to move forward in that gap. By employing digital technology to generate art works, the artists demonstrate a compression of time and space where awareness of our being in the world consists of act and observation simultaneously. The formal immediacy of this incomprehensible process comes to bear on the visual and spatial relationships the viewer experiences throughout the exhibition.

Perhaps the best example of information’s relationship to time is Anthony Discenza’s A Viewing (The Effect) (2010), which provides a meta-statement for the exhibition. Passing through a draped threshold and narrow hallway, one enters a dimly lit and carpeted space whose low ceilings and padded flooring transport the viewer out of any recognizable context. A circular bench rests in the middle. After taking a few moments to adjust, one begins to follow a female voice describing a set of absent images. The voice follows each description with the statement, “The effect of which…” and then makes comparisons to everyday and art historical examples. A Viewing creates a space in which we generate the visual phenomena cerebrally, demonstrating that the experience of looking is as much a construction of our experience and expectations as it is a new encounter with an image. The work locates the present as an accumulation of memories by divorcing us from any actual visual stimuli. In essence, it suggests, we may only look for that which we wish to see.

These works by Najjar, Bollinger and Discenza stand out as exemplary within the exhibition, while others would fare better under less broad circumstances. The two tables by Adrien Segal represent data concerning the San Francisco Bay tides and the Colorado River’s water table as it relates to human consumption. Generating furniture whose use necessitates a tactile experience with this data, Segal makes domestic interiors political. The work conflates the place of habitation with the data that describes the home’s surrounding natural and social conditions. Yet within the framework of the exhibition it is easy to lose the social impact of these tables, as they appear like the sculptural complements to the videos and photographs hanging on the walls.

Through such effects, the curators’ attempt to provide a portrait of data-oriented activity over the last twenty years in a small exhibition space loses traction by being too general in its scope. The exhibition’s frequently ranging content—collage, sculpture, furniture, video, photography and sound—tends to obscure the most interesting aspect of the exhibition. This lack of focus forces much of the work into generalizations surrounding the key language the curators employ: “data,” “information,” “politics,” “technology,” and “time.” Even so, the works that provide an experience of the dizzying process by which we reorient our sense of time to information remain strong in Data Deluge and will not be lost in their real-time environment.

• 1. Gugelberger, Rachel, and Reynard Loki. "Data Deluge.” Ballroom Marfa. <http://ballroommarfa.org/art/>.
• 2. The inclusion of a section of Hans Haacke’s original News (1969) is an attempt to frame the exhibition within post war art practice, to show that artists have been working with information systems for at least the last fifty years. The work is an early fragment of a larger project that Haacke continually updated, first generating the sculpture through a continuous news ticker in a gallery and more recently utilizing an RSS feed. However, presented in the reception space that connects the gallery’s two halves, the work becomes an anachronistic footnote to the exhibition’s generalization of artistic systems analysis.
• 3. Najjar references Caspar David Friedrich’s 19th century paintings of mountaintops, the most famous of which, Wanderer Above The Mist, shows a man on a mountain facing the turbulent alpine landscape below him.