Data Warp was originally a 4 foot tall by 63 foot long installation piece made for my MFA thesis, installed in the Indiana University Grunwald Gallery in May 2021.
The piece included appropriated terms of service from Facebook, photos from social media, images I had taken, plastic film, and spray paint on woven Tyvek. The purpose of the work was to try to conceive of a single moment, a snapshot in time, of all the data being collected by social media companies and data brokers across the internet. Moments that are at once both public and surprisingly intimate are shared online, and information from those images, our behaviors such as liking, commenting, and scroll speed, are all compiled into psychological profiles used to optimize algorithms to hold our attention, enriching tech giants like Meta.
This work was deeply informed by Shosanna Zuboff’s concept of the attention economy, the works and writing of James Bridle, and the material sensibilities of artists such as Dinh Q. Le and Nathalie Miebach.
In 2022, I reconfigured this artwork into the “Vertical Format” in which it was shown 12 feet tall by 20 feet long.
Kathryn Combs 