Our relationship with data is complicated. While statistics are often portrayed as objective, apolitical and simply offering ‘facts’ about the world, there is increasing evidence of how they can be manipulated, misunderstood or easily placed entirely out of context.

Add to this the sense that we are being constantly surveilled – via the cookies on our computers, the cameras on our streets and the in-built tracking elements of our smartphones – and it is easy to think of data in conspiratorial terms, something that can (and at some point probably will) be used against us.

Yet data of course can equally be used as a force for good, to aid understanding, change people’s minds and expose corruption. Perhaps the key is to always approach it with a questioning mind, to look at what is left out of the data we are presented with as much as what is within it. And this is where Domestic Data Streamers, a studio operating out of Barcelona, comes in.

The studio works on an array of projects, for charities and museums as well as commercial clients, with the aim of helping people recognise that “the world couldn’t be understood without numbers, but it wouldn’t be understood with numbers alone”. In other words, they want to bring the subjective into the supposedly objective world of data, numbers and statistics.

“If you look at everything through the lenses of data, you’ll see a reality, but it’s never a complete reality because data and science is generally reductionist,” Domestic Data Streamers’ director and founding partner Pau Aleikum Garcia explains to me after the group’s talk at the recent Offf festival in Barcelona.

“Data tends to dehumanise or neutralise a lot of the physical and emotional connections with other things. Don’t take me the wrong way, I love data and I think it’s very powerful. I have seen a lot of epic things done because there was someone working with data, but there is abuse – we are trying to fight that abuse because it numbs us, it makes us less permeable to what is behind this data, which is the really important thing.”

Garcia cites Google Maps as an example of how we can be presented with a vision of the world that is the ‘truth’ yet has been reduced or manipulated to take out some of its awkward realities. “You never see homeless people in Google Maps. They are there, of course, and there is a big presence in some cities like San Francisco, but you will not see it in Google Maps. Why? Because it is not ‘important information’, but it is human information. So there is always a decision which is deeply political on what is being counted and what is not.

“Data has always been political,” he continues. “If you go back to the first revolution of the Roman Empire from the Jews, it was a revolution that was against the census. They didn’t want to get counted, because getting counted was a way to understand how many they were and where they were exactly … to count something is to have power over it.”

Domestic Data Streamers was formed in 2013 in Barcelona and evolved out of street art. “We started doing art installations in the street,” says Garcia. “The first data installations were graffiti, visualising things that were happening in the street. For example, we spent 24 hours at a wall, visualising the amount of people that passed in front of it. We were mixing this idea of the concept of data and this factual scientific thing with the idea of art, which is a deeply subjective thing. And that was the crossover that we were trying to explore at the beginning.”

This blurring of art and science, the factual with the emotional, remains central to the group’s work today. Now a studio of 40 people, they work on 10-15 projects at any one time, though some of these will stretch over a three-year period, whereas others are far shorter.

Their work broadly falls into three categories: Education and research, where the group works with academic institutions and research centres to explore initiatives in data design, information technology and machine learning; Art and research, which results in projects or exhibitions which tackle societal or cultural issues; and agency work, where DDS works with commercial clients to use data to bring awareness of individual issues, from the serious to the fun.

If you look at everything through the lenses of data, you’ll see a reality, but it’s never a complete reality because data and science is generally reductionist

The result is a wildly eclectic set of projects, from exhibitions tackling violence against women and how we interact with algorithms to projects highlighting how AI models can manipulate truth and a website that tracks child marriage around the world.

The diverse nature of their work meant that DDS initially found it hard to sum up what they do. “It was difficult for us to sell our work because it’s not like a product that you purchase and it’s so different for every project,” says Garcia. “So it’s difficult to market what we do. But now after 10 years, it’s easier. People know us and most of the clients come from other clients that work with us – this is the number one way of getting new clients.”

While some of their projects are more functional – tracking how UNICEF invests its money, for example, and making this transparent, “the information is delivered to you in a really accessible way, you have context, you can compare” – others try to capture the nuance around topics by inviting participation from the audience.

For the Barcelona-based exhibition You Had to be a Feminist, which addressed everyday sexism as well as issues such as the gender pay gap and the glass ceiling at work, the group presented data and information in dynamic and unusual ways but also invited the public to contribute their own stories. These experiences were submitted via an online portal but then appeared in the exhibition via a set of mini printers which printed out the testimonials anonymously and instantaneously. Thousands of stories were published by the exhibition’s end.

For a recent project, titled The Citizens’ Office of Synthetic Memories, audience participation lies at its core. Described as “a public office for visual memory reconstruction using AI”, it offers a “personal memory reconstruction service”, allowing participants to use AI to bring to life memories that have no visual record. These are then included in an archive.

The project offers families and communities the opportunity to create visual legacies that have been lost, especially those who have faced persecution or migration journeys. DDS is conscious that this is sensitive work – “memories are the architects of our identity now,” says Garcia – and before opening the office, the studio trained people to act as both prompters for the AI and also interviewers.

The archive is open to visitors and raises interesting philosophical questions around truth and memory. Garcia points out that they deliberately use AI models which are old so the resulting images don’t look too real, but he has experienced people placing the AI-created imagery among real photos of their family, such is its emotional power.

In a way, The Citizens’ Office of Synthetic Memories is a perfect illustration of DDS’ aims – merging technology, data, real-life stories and emotion to help us look at the world differently. For Garcia, it illustrates the role that art can play in helping us understand the statistics that make up our world.

“We instrumentalise art and use artistic disciplines as a way to tell stories,” he says. “It’s a very comfortable space, because you can do things that maybe in the academy [or in the] corporate space, you cannot. Art is very free in terms of exploration and research, so we use that.

“At the end it’s about understanding and connection, nothing else,” he concludes. “It’s how we can understand that we are not so different. It’s how we can understand better the environment in which we live and do it in a way that is not purely objective but also understanding that subjectivism is important because we are subjective creatures. We live in our heads.”

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