Installations for the Information Age

"This year alone, more data will be generated than in the cumulative history of humanity," says Dan Goods. "Stuff is being collected in all sorts of interesting forms and piling up somewhere. What do we do with it?" It's an apt question for the Too Much Information Age, and to address the query, Goods and co-curator David Delgado have rounded up a collection of geek-friendly installations on display through April 12 at Pasadena Museum of California Art's "Data + Art" exhibition.

Inspired in part by Edward Tufte's landmark 1983 book, "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information," Goods and Delgado, both Jet Propulsion Laboratory staffers, view the show as a "curiosity shop" encompassing weird science, animation, images and music. Pieces include Long Now Foundation's "Rosetta Disk," a 2.8-inch-wide wafer micro-inscribed with 13,000 pages of documentation representing more than 1,500 languages and intended for the edification of alien civilizations. Chris Chafe and Greg Niemeyer's "Untitled" installation uses sensors that measure carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, then programs the data to trigger guitar sounds.

Then there's the explosion of sharp-edged shards titled "Spam Architecture." MIT Media Lab researcher Alex Dragulescu designed the piece by translating key words and text patterns from unsolicited e-mails into a 3-D embodiment of junk messages. Delgado notes, "These bizarre objects with sharp, aggressive corners make you connect with the piece in a similar way perhaps that you feel about spam in the first place."

Information overload is processed in a more benign fashion by "Data + Art" contributor Jim Bumgardner. A California Institute of the Arts graduate and former Yahoo employee who now programs software for Santa Monica-based website TopSpinMedia .com, Bumgardner says, "I'm one of these people who's halfway between art and the nerd-dom world. I've tried to use both sides of the brain as much as possible."

To craft his group portrait of user-generated images titled "A Year of Sunsets," Bumgardner wrote software scripts that collected 15,000 user-generated photos uploaded to the Flickr .com website in 2008. Sorted chronologically from left to right, the thumbnail images form an undulating curve that peaks in summer, when sunsets occur later in the day, and dips as the equinox approaches.