VFF: Sifting Data

This summer, independent artist Heather Gordon completed a residency at the Rubenstein Center for the Arts with a project titled "Forest for the Trees". Please join us for Heather's discussion of how orphaned data from Duke Forest archives expanded her artistic practice and informs her creative output with a more outward looking stance. Over her career, Heather has used both personal and public data to construct origami folding patterns to show the shape of a specific narrative. Her presentation will trace the origins of her ideas about the ambiguities of number, the acquisition of meaning, and the fear of unperceived existence. Specifically, she will speak to how and why she creates geometric folding patterns using rule-based methods and a variety of data such as binary conversions, date and time intervals, and geographic locations to create visual information structures.