Elke Finkenauer
visual artist

BitParts is the digital archive of the drawing project and handmade dataset containing a drawing, colour tile and description of 5279 thing from my studio. Over two and a half years I documented these materials, experiments and fragments using pencil, biro, felt-pen, and drawing techniques associated with breaking out of habitual thinking. Through this process I modelled in a slow, analogue way what goes on when a dataset is created.
 
From 2023-6, using an interactive web-based tool, viewers could explore this dataset as individual things (datapoints), as categories, and on a continuum from literalness to abstraction. Whilst digitising the dataset broadened access beyond fragile things and fixed locations, it also required ascribing written and numerical language to the things it mediated. BitParts foregrounds and resists this translation. This work draws on my experience as a data analyst to challenge what I see as common misconceptions around data: that it is collected (rather than created), that it is objective, that it is absolute, that it speaks. By framing drawing as data I emphasise the creative, human inputs into data and the abstract thought necessary to make, and question, meaning.

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A note on datasets /

Datasets can contain numerical information, text, and images. Digital datasets are behind many aspects of daily life, from public transport to online shopping websites and healthcare diagnoses. They are used to build analyses that inform decision-making and policy, and in machine learning (commonly called AI) to teach algorithms what to recognise and classify. To be usable (which means computable), data must be annotated. Information is added to describe certain details. The work of annotation is often crowdsourced through platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk. It is low paid piecework which demands a fast pace of working. This human input is critical, hidden, and often overlooked.