Reality is a number – A number is not reality

An exhibition at the intersection of data and numbers

I reactivate this newsletter to report that, from Saturday, July 12, for one week, six of my charts will be exhibited in the Spazio Grafico Art Gallery in Massa Marittima, Italy. This represents a huge step for me, and it is an exercise where I try to reflect on numbers, data, and reality. After the chart, you will see the text I wrote to present the show.

This graphic designer took the official photo of the Uffizi in Florence and calculated how much of the painting's surface was covered by the colors that an algorithm took. The colors are slightly muted because they are the average colors identified by selecting 100 clusters as the maximum number.

Has anyone ever seen a “two” walking down the street? Nope. At most, you have seen two cats, two apples, two “somethings”, but never the figure “two” as such. Numbers, therefore, are a human invention useful to represent and approximate reality, not reality itself. Yet, numbers are the most effective way to describe the reality our species has found so far.

This paradox is the subject of my exhibition: in a counterpoint between different worlds, and experiments that try to build common ground between the quantitative realm and visual languages, I reflect on the nature of numbers and data. The tension develops between a divertissement like a Mondrian-like Spring of Botticelli and experimental graphics that use only longitude and time as dimensions to tell the history of migrations.

Current affairs and art: what do they have in common? The intervention of a machine to turn data into information and the almost incommensurable distance between objects and their representations. The exhibition aims to dehydrate reality and choose the information to show without pre-determined rules: the intensity of specific notes in Bach, the share of colors in Botticelli’s Spring. We lose, in the process, a colossal amount of information, focusing on what I decided matters – how arrogant of me.

Yet, the topic is most definitely the individual’s point of view, how the individual selects information regarding a story to tell, the need for someone to say something, and it is a topic also valid when dealing with numbers, even when information is elaborated via a neutral machine like a computer.

For this exhibition, I wrote the software to create the charts you see exposed. The R programming language (widely used in the bioinformatics sector) has a package devoted to graphics. This package allows almost absolute freedom, permitting diversions like the Fractal Fern, which I hope is the climax of this highly experimental exhibition.

This show stems from the frustration I developed working in companies and newsrooms where the thought on numbers never investigates beyond the “how many?” as if “how many” were the ultimate answer and the only one that matters. Data do not speak by themselves, unfortunately: we must extract stories from them.

The point is that individuals tell their own stories, and the most they can do is make sure that, things being the same, others find the same stuff they found, beginning a conversation which is the opposite of the world we currently live in: “Trump said it,” “Science says so,” I say so.

If anything, this exhibition tries to move the problem: if even numbers are a representation, what is the fuss about?

See you here Saturday.