Data Stories X Rachel Briscoe

Data Stories

In the era of the so-called "post-truth society", it is becoming increasingly important to enabled (and encourage) people to understand data sources in an easily accessible form, while ensuring truthfulness and accuracy. Data Stories aims to understand: (a) whether people engage more with data that is made directly relevant to them; (b) whether people engage more with data through interaction; and (c) whether people will share data more often if sharability is built into the presentation. Data must entertain as well as inform, and excite as well as educate. Data Stories aims to explore the development of new ways of presenting data, including new types of visualisation, art installations, games, and storytelling. Data Stories will deliver the tools and guidance that community and civic groups need to achieve broader participation and support for their initiatives at local and national level, and empower artists, designers, statisticians, analysts, and journalists to communicate with data in inspiring, informative ways.

Smoking Gun

Smoking Gun is a piece of interative fiction played on your phone over the course of a week. You are contacted by a whistleblower, who says he has information about something that needs to be made public. He can’t tell you exactly what, for fear of being identified but he can direct you to publicly available information where, he says, you can find out what he knows. You solve puzzles, scrutinize videos and images, follow clues.

Over the course of the game, your detective work uncovers incendiary information which could bring down a controversial public figure. You – and the others playing, who you can chat with online – must decide whether you go public. But who and what can you trust?

Smoking Gun takes popular elements of detective thrillers and grounds them in data: in order to get beyond ‘post-truth’, the player must evaluate the conflicting claims of different characters and see how they measure up to real world data. The piece also incorporates realtime data about things such as weather, traffic to give the impression that the story is unfolding in parallel with players’ lives, helping it feel plausible and immersive.

Rachel Briscoe

fanSHEN make unforgettable creative interventions which are participatory, playful and political. They are a recovering theatre company, who now design and create audience-centric experiences which involve elements of performance, game and installation. They collaborate with designers, computational artists, scientists, musicians, film-makers, writers and all sorts of other people.

They take big, complex subjects and synthesise them into embodied experiences. They are interested in art as a liminal space within which risks can be taken, in polyphonic experiences, and in bringing groups together in ways that challenge the idea that life and other people are frightening. They want generosity, intellectual rigour and radical alternatives.

They have an ongoing collaboration with computational artist and privacy advocate Joe McAlister. His work focuses on themes encompassing metadata, security and embodied interaction, taking a particular interest in how technology can be used to aid progressive discussion.

Together fanSHEN and Joe created The Justice Syndicate (York Mediale, National Theatre of Scotland, ‘Enthralling courtroom simulation which cuts to the heart of what it is to be an informed voter’ 5*s, The Stage) and are currently working on new projects which combine narrative and data in new and interesting ways.

https://www.fanshen.org.uk/

See Profile

Smoking Gun is collaboration between artists Rachel Briscoe, Dan Barnard and Joe McAlister and Data Stories Tech Project from the University of Southampton. It is a playful and interactive approach exploring the power of data in the age of disinformation. You are invited to solve puzzles, scrutinize documents, wrangle datasets and chat about the evidence with fellow players to uncover what is really going on at the heart of government. The objective is to see how people engage with data if it’s made meaningful to them through narrative and game mechanisms.

Using data as part of the story and invite audiences to engage with is what Smoking Gun is all about. But, what else can be asked people to do with data? The residency is based upon an interaction design perspective approach that would appeal to a diverse range of people, not just those who were already interested in data or digital art. It is also a construction that audience members are able to discover through the clues that they received over the course of the five days of the piece. A list of all the different possible types of data (e.g. graphs, spreadsheets, financial accounts, computer UUID logs, security camera photos etc.) was created in order to find the best format of data, and the best order to include in the narrative. The team researched a lot on how to make the evidence data as authentic as possible. They worked on the creation of evidence data using a variety of media and a variety of processes to create an app and adjusting it according to feedback from the prototype versions.

What the team was really looking at was the way in which the public consume and engage with the artwork itself. The outcomes of the residency are: an interactive digital artwork that is available to the public that can be experienced via smartphones or tablets, an in-depth knowledge exchange between the academic and artistic partners and the creation of a platform for research into collaborative data analysis. Smoking Gun is a platform framework for telling yet more stories about data. And it can be re-used on the exploration of additional stories covering new topics including data privacy, targeted advertisements, and "fake news", as well as exploring the depth of communication methods available to participants.

Interview with FanSHEN at CENTQUATRE-Paris, during the STARTS Residencies Days 2020

Read the final report