You Are the Data
An immersive data exhibit on embodied datafication and the limits of human-data interaction through live coding
Mirko Bonfiglio ¹, Alessio Caccamo ²
Sapienza University of Rome
KEYWORD
#data exhibit #human-data interaction #live coding
#embodied cognition #surveillance capitalism
You Are the Data is an immersive exhibit whose data is not drawn from any archive but generated by the visitor’s body in real time — cardiac frequency and facial geometry, made perceptible across four acts. It argues that datafication’s structural invisibility cannot be countered by representational transparency alone: knowing data is collected does not convey what extraction feels like. The visitor traverses datafication from within rather than observing it, as it inverts Human-Data Interaction’s principles — legibility, agency, negotiability — enacting Floridi’s onlife condition.
CREATIVE PROCESS
Developed as master’s thesis research in Communication Design at Sapienza (2024–25), the project moved through three phases: a theoretical framing (Floridi, Zuboff, Turkle, Rosa, Lupton); a comparative analysis of four precedents (Anadol, McCarthy, Domestic Data Streamers, Massive Attack × UVA); and implementation as a four-act sequence on Arduino and TouchDesigner.
IMPLICATIONS & NEXT STEPS
By inverting HDI’s emancipatory principles, the exhibit enacts the onlife entanglement of body, data and environment as a coupled system, contributing to RSD15’s inquiry into data as a medium that makes interdependencies perceptible. Scalable across gallery, festival and performance contexts, its next step is a fully open-source iteration aligning technical substrate with ethical argument.
References
Floridi, L. (2020). Pensare l’infosfera: La filosofia come design concettuale. Raffaello Cortina Editore.
Lupi, G. (2017). Data humanism, a visual manifesto. Print Magazine. https://giorgialupi.com/data-humanism-my-manifesto-for-a-new-data-wold
Lupton, D. (2016). The quantified self: A sociology of self-tracking. Polity Press.
McCarthy, L. L. (2024). Bodily autonomy [Exhibition catalogue]. UC San Diego Mandeville Art Gallery.
Zuboff, S. (2019). Il capitalismo della sorveglianza. Luiss University Press.