A Fractal Manifesto - Stina Baudin
Stina Baudin
Data is a tool used to collect information and convey how social structures impact our lived experiences. The visualized recordings of our lives – represented in the form of images, graphs, observations, symbols and numbers – are widely considered as fact. Yet categorisation often misrepresents marginalized people, or not at all.
In this visual sonic spatial installation, Canadian-Haitian visual artist Stina Baudin and British, Berlin-based experimental music artist Abigail Toll, attempted to break down the objective logic of a dataset. Through a process of what theorist Denise Ferreira da Silva terms fractal thinking, they “de-centre time and sequentiality to identify compositional patterns that reveal the structuring grammar of our world.” Through a process spanning almost a year, the artists collected truth values from their own daily experiences and co-created across the six hour time difference between Germany and Canada. Together, they distorted hierarchies of knowledge and centered nuanced conversations surrounding their histories of migration that are ordinarily left absent from datasets. Layering together six woven panels combined with six music movements that encapsulate six themes – etymologies, water, time/displacement, flight, wonder, and memory – the six topics were generated through their research and illustrated with digitized and distorted layering of woven images and sound, as well as a co-creative manifesto. The fragmented sound and illegible visual documentation called into question not only the absence and distortions that the artists found in previous datasets, but highlighted how lived experience and memories (our truth values) undergo a process of fragmentation and distortion over time.
