Data Miner (Dinges, 2008)

Amongst Michael Dinges “Dead Laptop Series” is this gem: “Data Miner“. The drawing is engraved plastic and acrylic paint on a dead apple laptop (hence the series name). The illustration is of an octopus with scrolls which says: “Of all the creatures in the ocean, beware those feeding on Brownian motion”, and around the edge is written: “The innoncent have nothing to fear from the surveillance of desire”¹.

The artist provides the following terminology for Brownian motion: “a physics term used to describe a particle in constant erratic motion” and Data mining: “the non-trivial extraction of previously unknown, and potentially useful, information from data”². Brownian motion is often applied to non-physical things, such as the stock market³, and in this case probably refers to the apparently random motion of data generated by the behaviour of people online⁴.

1. Dinges, Michael, ‘Dead Laptop Series’, http://www.michaeldinges.com/Image.asp?ImageID=488209&apid=1&gpid=1&ipid=1&AKey=CDS8CGNT (Accessed: 13th Jan 2009).
2. ibid.
3. Brownian Motion, Wikipedia,http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownian_motion
4. Yes, you are a particle too.