‘Every day we are bombarded with information. We are exposed to mass media, propaganda and advertisements. Artists like Julieta show how this disturbing landscape that surrounds us is shaping our views and perception of life,’ says Florencia Giordana Braun, founder and director of Rolf Art, who will be exhibiting new work by the artist at the fair.

For her recent work BUNKER (2018-2023), Argentinian Peruvian artist Julieta Tarraubella sent a group of performers wearing futuristic LED-screen glasses into the streets of Buenos Aires, São Paulo, and Getxo. Running across the lenses of their glasses was a continuous stream of headlines from newspapers and blogs flashing before their eyes in blinding red light. Standing motionless under highways and in dark alleys, they evoked a gang of mindless cyborgs controlled by mass media. ‘It’s very Black Mirror,’ jokes the artist, referring to the dystopian television series. ‘People had different reactions: Some read the headlines, some felt uncomfortable, and others thought it was a protest.’ Tarraubella is part of a growing number of artists who are using data as a medium to create powerful work that speaks to the zeitgeist of our times. Whether it’s using a large volume of public information as raw material or harnessing more obscure hidden facts, their research-based practices hold up a powerful mirror to our fast-changing world governed by data.

For the gallery’s booth, Tarraubella will be creating Secret Life of Flowers (2018-2024), an installation that evokes a sci-fi-like laboratory. On view will be 20 flowers whose life cycle is scrutinized by surveillance cameras. On the walls will be a series of screens assembled like mosaics depicting footage of the slowly decaying plants. The work is a metaphor for the performativity of our lives. ‘We are all performing in certain ways for cameras. When you go onto the street, there are security cameras, but you are also always posing for your own cellphones and Instagram,’ Tarraubella says, alluding to the growing database of images many of us create and almost unwittingly distribute for public consumption.

Aside from exploring the complex relationship between technology and data, several artists exhibiting at the fair are also looking at these ideas in a broad, more poetic sense. ‘When people think of datasets, they may think of it more in a scientific way like a clearly defined group of numbers. But for an artist like Jesse Stecklow, data is everywhere. Language is data too,’ says Lucas Casso, founder of Berlin-based gallery Sweetwater, who will be showing Stecklow in the Positions sector. The Los Angeles-based artist will be showing a subtle installation of objects inspired by light and time. The piece builds on familiar forms used in his work over the past decade.

At the heart of Stecklow’s practice is a fascination with extracting data from his exhibition sites. He often installs air samplers-commonly used in factories to test for toxins–in spaces. Upon discovering elevated ethanol levels in a gallery, he began to reflect on the fact that most ethanol in the U.S. is produced from corn. This led him to experiment with corn-related products in his work and explore linguistic associations. The phrase ‘ear of corn’ came to mind, for instance, leading him to explore human ear imagery and related objects. In From Ear to Ear (2019) he created a platform–displaying a screen print of air sampler data–upon which sat a dried corn cob, corn whiskey, acetic acid (an oxidized form of the corn-based alcohol), and ear drops containing acetic acid. Creating an open-ended timeline of sorts, the piece is an example of how his art brings to light fascinating connections about our environment that we may ordinarily miss.

‘When people first encounter Jesse’s work, it can seem esoteric, didactic or even slightly confusing,’ says Casso. ‘But much of it relies on people’s abilities to recognize patterns. That can open up the work to be about more than the physical sculptures. You can think about agriculture, economy and fields that are much wider than art.’

As an increasing number of artists harness data as a new medium, their work offers audiences relief from the onslaught of information flooding our devices. Instead, their work invites people to see the world through a different lens at a slower pace. ‘You can walk through an art installation, but you can’t enter a newspaper article,’ says Casso. ‘Art generates unique experiences and translates information in ways that other fields simply cannot.’