Weight of data

“Weight of Data” is a series of the light art installations that has started with a question, ‘What value our digital and non-digital commodities represent for us in data?’ In order to make a sense of the value of data-driven virtual commodity into artworks, the artist decided to measure the value of a cryptocurrency into the weight of physical, edible commodities - rice, sugar and salt. Each artwork of this series is composed with 1 Kg of each agricultural raw product with embedded electronic parts. These selected commodities are valuable as being essential for human survivals and they used to function as a currency traded in history. Each artwork displays transformative light patterns in vivid colors through an algorithm that calculates the value of single cryptocurrency into the weight of each commodity value. It refreshes every 2 minutes in real-time along with the numeric ticker on screen that represents for the weight increase or decrease in correlation with the value of cryptocurrency against each commodity. With the embedded layers of cultural and historical context of these commodities, the artist asks an open question on the current issues of data by contrasting tangible ancient currency against virtual new currency