Data embodiment: approaching the body as a choreographic medium for performing abstract data

ABSTRACT The motivation to make information more accessible in data communication – physically to the senses and culturally to different audiences – has led designers to experiment, for example, in data physicalization and data sonification. Experimentation overlapping data communication and the performance arts suggests another practice is emerging. Calling it data embodiment, I define the term as a communicative and artistic method that approaches the body as a choreographic medium to physicalize and perform abstract data. The intent of this paper is to sufficiently delineate the space where bodily movement and abstract data have begun to intermingle across several milieu under the concept. The paper begins by contextualizing data embodiment in design, then continues by observing how choreographers have previously approached dance as data, and finishes with a case study where an environmental migration dataset is choreographed. A brief section on human-centered datasets and the surveillant technologies that produce them peppers the overarching discussion on bodily movement and abstract data. By reconstituting data in time and space, especially in the context of performance, otherwise sterile datasets are shown to become more physically and culturally accessible as well as aesthetically expressive.