Anti datamining is a transversal research project based on the recovery and the viewing/visualization of internet financial data flows. It aims at creating audiovisual environments written, fed and updated in real-time. The project finds its roots in the Data Mining practice, which focuses on producing optimum economic solutions through crossing data issued by very large banks. The development of this practice in several fields, including some located outside of economics, is symptomatic of the tendency to turn society into a more effective economic phenomenon. In this context the RYBN collective (Marika Dermineur, Kevin Bartoli, Jean-Marie Boyr) has started a Data Mining based research project in order to create several artistic pieces of work. However the goal of their analysis is not to find optimum solutions but to identify and visualise socially and economically imbalanced “phenomenas”. As Hakim Bey wrote in The Temporary Autonomous Zone (1984) “If we were to imagine an information map–a cartographic projection of the Net in its entirety–we would have to include in it the features of chaos”. Diverted from their original goals, Data Mining tools and Digital Monitoring technologies are in fact used by RYBN to generate a series of cartographic images of our society, pictured through its data flows and disparities, with the result of establishing a global imbalance map, a cartography of chaos.

Valentina Culatti