Wild Data

Wild Data is a playable eco-sci-fi experience where frazzled phone-gazing participants slip through the cracks of binary computation into an enchanted world of Wild Data. 

Players find themselves moving across three different simulated scenes that, like nature, change based on the time of the day.  Different editions of Wild Data are therefore synchronised across the world.

Visually stunning and demonstrative, Wild Data potently reimagines our commodified digital experience through the lens of extensive field work and research into European rewilding of the natural world.

Currently in the format of a playable (gaming) experience, the aim is to present Wild Data as an immersive multimedia installation projected onto semi-transparent screens set amongst natural and artificial elements: featuring additional large-scale sculptural works, atmospheric lighting and an enveloping soundtrack.

Big tech companies dominate the data landscape which prevents people from using technology in local, emergent and radical ways. Wild Data provokes this.

While the concept of ‘wild data’ should be wild and expansive itself, in this instance Heaney defined it be parts of an AI data set that would usually be seen as noise and removed before training. Therefore as players move through the digital wilderness of Wild Data

Gloriously resisting fixed and rigid categories beneficial to patriarchal capitalism, Heaney’s playable experience intertwines speculation of the present and future as the protagonist weaves through a multiverse of lush data-landscapes where they become enmeshed with dying oaks, ghostly habitats and swarms of pulsating glitches.

Wild Data was funded by a Mozilla Foundation Creative Media Award.

It has been streamed online on the Serpentine Gallery’s Twitch account (see below).