season 2 episode 10 – experiencing versus visualizing data | Daniel Canogar

Resources and links

• Studio Daniel Canogar website
• Daniel Canogar’s Echo
• Daniel Canogar’s exhibit with el Corte Inglés
• Daniel Canogar’s curved LED screens
• Zachry Engineering Education Complex – Texas A&M
• Daniel Canogar’s Pulse
• Tampa International Airport
• Studio Daniel Canogar Instagram
• When art and engineering intersect, innovation abounds

Transcripts

[00:00:00] Nir Hindi: Hey, Daniel, welcome to the Artian podcast.

Daniel Canogar: Thank you, NIR. It is amazing to be here with you.

Nir Hindi: Great, Daniel, I am fascinated about the work that you do, and you already have been part of our art and technology events, but I would be happy if you can tell briefly what you are doing to our listeners.

Daniel Canogar: I am an artist I am a visual artist.

Sometimes also I call myself a media artist because a lot of the work that I do is with technology. And I do work for galleries and museums and foundations, but I also do quite a lot of public art commissions for lobbies, for atriums, for, uh, you know, public spaces.

Nir Hindi: Many of these works involve data and motion.

Your works are very interactive, and they are very kind of, I would say active. Maybe I am interested to understand what led you. To work with data. How did you found [00:01:00] yourself working with data?

Daniel Canogar: I have this innate curiosity to understand how the kind of the modern infrastructures of our digital society work.

And I am also, I guess this is something that most artists do we are. We are very, always very interested in making visible, tangible, physical things that are kind of. Part of our society and part of our culture, but that people do not really pay attention to, or do not even know how to pay attention to, because they are kind of hidden so data, which is like the driving force of our, of our modern economies is quite abstract for the public.

And even though it is such a driving force, as I was saying of, of, of the world, we live in. Very few people really kind of understand. What about data? Where is the data? You know, it is, it is just, it is kind of a miracle actually an engineering miracle. So, this obviously attracted me, became very interesting for me to try [00:02:00] to, for myself and for my audience to give a more tangible, more sensual experience of data.

And this is something that is kind of important for me to explain that rather than doing data visualization. In other words, there are some amazing people to do these kinds of great graphic gardens, you know, charts and ways of displaying, very complex information, very complex data into a form. That is easy to clear to understand my approach is one of the artists that use data as raw material, the way.

A painter would use canvas and the paintbrush and paint to create his or her painting. So, this is my raw material is data, and I am very interested in giving the public an experience of data to give them almost like a physical sensual sense, short of the experience of data to get a, almost like the [00:03:00] pulse, the feeling of a pulse.

That is the beauty behind this. It is a kind of near world of big data that is exploded really in the last 10, 15 years. I think the artists, are very curious and want to understand and know our times we want to respond to them. Art is a tool that allows us to respond to our times. And therefore, I have this kind of urge and I would even sound was like a responsibility to kind of respond to this new phenomenon.

That is changing everything.

Nir Hindi: This is great. I mean, I love it that you are thinking about that notice in the context of visualization, but data as an experience. So, I am interested. Can you give us one example? How do you use data as a raw material to create an experience, maybe one of your work?

Daniel Canogar: Yes,

perhaps I could mention my series echo, which I did two years ago. And I think this was, uh, the beginning perhaps of my work with data. It is a series of sculptural screens. These are these [00:04:00] flexible led screens that, um, I have an engineer on my team. And Diego and he kind of helped me develop these flexible led tiles.

Nir Hindi: Yeah. We will talk about this innovation in a

second.

Daniel Canogar:  Okay. And so, these sculptural screens are not traditional screens that you just kind of sit in front of and watch whatever the screen is featuring. These are screens that I kind of.

Twist

this such as musicians, possibly teach business professionals, the space that contains them, usually it is a gallery space or the home or wherever it is.

I have one in my living room, for example, and the kind of the work of having this kind of glowing presence because it is LEDs are quite potent. They illuminate the walls the ceiling the floor around them. So, on these screens, Kind of very kind of curving sculptural screens. You see this abstraction, this a generative [00:05:00] abstraction that is responding to different kinds of data related to climate change.

I mean, I have not been working for data earlier than that, but climate change data is something that I started working with. You know, two years ago. And so, one of the artworks in response to active fires in real-time around the globe,

Nir Hindi: Those are the red ones, I went to see it in the gallery,

Daniel Canogar: exactly view. It has like this kind of red and orange fire light cues that you do not literally see them plant.

You just see these kinds of. In fact, that piece that our work is facing the wall is basically it is kind of trends around a quarter. So, you see this kind of glow ember light, um, colors on the white and the more, the more fires are active at any given time, the more resplendent and activated the animation becomes on the screen.

Likewise, with air quality index with temperatures. Um, I have another one [00:06:00] that’s winter. Rainfall the average rainfall in 195 capitals around me.

Nir Hindi: Those are

the

blue ones,

Daniel Canogar: the blue

ones.

Nir Hindi: Well, we will make sure to put some photos of those working on our website on the show notes so people can get to see it.

Daniel Canogar: It is beautiful work, very poetic, even though they deal with the very difficult, I think maybe a topic like a climate crisis.

It is kind of an interesting class to create these kinds of beautiful objects about the subject matter. That is not that beautiful, the opposite, but I am interested in creating that kind of like almost like friction.

And who is said that the aesthetics objects cannot have a message that is socially or even politically powerful? Also, I guess it is important for me. To create the different experiences of climate change data. That is not just about looking at numbers or these typical images of the [00:07:00] planets that have all these hot red spots from whatever the ocean temperatures rising or the melting of the polar caps.

I am very interested in finding new ways of conveying this information. New ways. That kind of is trying to break through the numbness thing. I think we have from just getting all this information about climate change and all these numbers that are mostly very depressing. I really want people to have, more of a sense of pulse.

The pulse, like the sun, was like this planet. It is the planet’s heart beating and it is beating with a certain kind of difficulty. And so, I am kind of trying to enter the sensorium of the public differently, in a way that’s kind of more intuitive, more emotional, maybe, you know, so that’s kind of what I. My thinking behind these, these projects, that data,

Nir Hindi: You touch on, something that is very interesting for me is that what you try to achieve in your work.

And you talk about this friction. You talk about how making people may be more emotional or maybe. [00:08:00] A feel the beat of the universe or the planet and why it is important for you to kind of make people experience in that case, it can be the climate crisis, but you have other data works that work with the Google trends with artworks, et cetera, et cetera.

Why, what is it about this experience that you try to achieve with your

work?

Daniel Canogar: Um, that is a question I, I am still trying to figure out to be honest, and I will take a stab at it now because I have been thinking about it. And one of the characteristics of all these recent data works is they take, tend to be very hypnotic, the invites, the public to Hangouts and observe this kind of meditative generative animation.

That is constantly changing by the data feed that is coming in. And I think. There is something very mantra-like about these animations. I started practicing transcendental meditation about five years ago, and it has been an incredible asset and change in my life. And [00:09:00] I think this kind of started coinciding with my time that I started working with data.

There may be some connection there that I have not realized. I am trying, I think where they, what I am trying to do is I am trying to find within this extremely chaotic excessive realm of data. I mean, that’s part of the problem with data is that it is just so much of it. It is just so huge. And part of the art of process unit and organizing it and understanding and getting meaning and value out of it.

That is the big challenge. That is where the value of the good. Programming and coding and algorithm building are that is exactly where the art is. But I, in this sense, I think within this kind of excessive, chaotic and abundancy of it and trying to find this kind of inner border, this almost like this order that goes beyond the control of humans that we have created this strange.

Digital re all this strange world that we do not have this ability to store all this information, all this [00:10:00] data that we are producing, that we are collecting from all kinds of phenomena, from things that happened here on the surface of the planet, to things that happened upon the cosmos. I mean, it is really the, is infinite.

I am trying to find this kind of inner order within the chaoticness craziness, excessiveness overwhelmingness of it. I am trying to find a spark. This kind of internal order without wanting to sound too spiritual, but I think there is this kind of spiritual quest and my work. And I think art, in general, has a spiritual quality.

Anyway,

Nir Hindi: I love it. I mean, from all the conversations that we had, you opened my eyes to think rethink maybe about data is more than experience and not visualization. The thing about data as you just mentioned it is around us. I think, from every aspect then. The best is yet to come. As they say, with all the technologies that IOT, et cetera.

And I feel that we are all the time aggregating as you just said, but the challenge is how you make it tangible or [00:11:00] make it understandable. And besides the work that you do for museums and galleries, you also had the chance to work with companies and help them maybe transform. They are kind of data or use their data differently.

And I would be happy to hear maybe about the project that you did with the Corte Inglés, which is a very big department store chain here in Madrid in Spain, and you use their data to kind of communicate something different. I am interested. Can you tell us more about this project?

Daniel Canogar: Well, I was approached by this, this department store El Corte Inglés in Spain, which is where I am based.

And I guess for those that do not know. El Corte Inglés. If you are not, if you are listening to this podcast from out of Spain, um, it would be the equivalent of a North American Macy’s or something like that. Middle class, huge. I think a very well-run business. They always seem to have everything you need with you go over there and it is like a place that you always when you cannot find [00:12:00] something, you run to the Corte Inglés.

And el Corte Inglés. Basically, it has these seven windows on this pedestrian street is the busiest street in the entire country. And once a year, they offer these windows to artists to create a project. So, they approached me and. I am very interested in this kind of conversation with the public, uh, leaving the confines of a gallery museum, you know, where you tend to get maybe a public that is a little more informed about art, or I am kind of also interested in this other kind of public that knows nothing about art and kind of bringing art to bear, you know, more urban, every day experienced.

So, what I did is. I created a patchwork of screens. Uh, these were screens that I would be rejected by customers. In other words, they had bought screens in this department store and there was something wrong with the screen was scratched or it was not working well with some, [00:13:00] some problems. And of course, there is this policy where you can return the screen.

I was very interested in collecting that material, which. Usually, would have ended up going to the recycling center.

Nir Hindi: Yeah.

Maybe it is a great opportunity to mention all the DVDs that you collected and the amazing camera collections that, eh, eh, you have, you have this thing with a collection of technology.

Maybe we can even talk about that later, but for

sure.

Daniel Canogar: And broken technologies or optionally technologies, I have a kind of empathy for them. So, I took on as almost as the support. Orphan TV screens that have been rejected. And I gave them a new purpose in life, which is to put them on the, uh, the windows of the Corte Inglés, which I thought was kind of a, for me, all of us, conceptually already liked that premise because.

In a way, these windows create consumption [00:14:00], and then this consumption creates waste. So, I was very interested in getting these wastes and putting them back. It is kind of where it started, where it started and one of them was shiny and new. So anyway, I created this, patchwork there are 85 screens are all kinds of sizes, all kinds of different eras.

Some of them were kind of a, not new and older models, computer screens. TV screens or led LCD. And I was kind of thinking of it as a patchwork because the origin was department store is tailoring. Was that it started as a small tailor’s house and close to the Puerta del Sol, which is where the first store was. Now, of course, it is something much bigger, but the patchwork element to the screens was important. That way I kind of layered them almost like the way you would do a quilt or something like that. And I really do think of screens as a modern form of textiles.

That is another thing that I wanted to kind of emphasize in the project. So, what I did is I created an animation that was connected to [00:15:00] the webpage for online shopping for the department store, which I was surprised to find is. Seriously competing with Amazon here in Spain. I mean, they are starting to do very well with their online shopping.

And, um, so my programmer and I, we were able to access data, other data, what they are selling, and we would capture the little photograph of the product, the item that was for sale and through programming would eliminate the background. And we would just have the actual whatever it was, the hat or the shoe or the bra or the.

TV or whatever it was that was committing. So, and we created this very kind of a broken textile, like animation that was inspired by barcodes. So, you can see those products through like lines that were kind of thinking about barcodes as the first phase in which these products were kind of. Coded, you know, I have thought of this idea because when I was driving, I was in Miami and I was driving.

I could not [00:16:00] use the inventor, the barcode just tides that same day. And they were talking about the history of Marco’s is super interesting as the first time that, you know, products and seventies are when it happened too. That could be turned into code into information. You know, that’s kind of the world we are in now where everything is broken down to data.

That was kind of the idea of commerce becoming, getting in touch with data. So, I brought those two worlds together and I created this kind of animation that you could see on these seven windows displays where literally every minute hundred of people would walk by and it was all live and generative. And we were able to, the commerce was so fast, and we were able to combine different products.

Chromatically so suddenly we had one window where you would only get the green products that were getting sold. And Lupron was really very complex at any end, very SAS, a lot of work, the very satisfying project and wonderful to see the craziness of the [00:17:00] street and how. How they would react and sometimes be confused.

Other times people would stand, watch.

What is cool.

Nir Hindi: I guess that someone now listening and say, okay, you put all this effort, you took all these skins, use them again, and then use the data from the website. And what was the purpose? What you try to achieve when you chose the website, put it on the screen, what you were hoping to achieve at that specific work.

Daniel Canogar: Part

of the message is how this flagship store, which is right smack downtown Madrid is kind of becoming a. Obsoletes, you know, we are talking about these screens that would be rejected. These actual physical stores maybe are not as significant anymore as were particularly since I did this project, I did this project in February right into the beginning of the pandemic.

And this is just. Multiplied tenfold that kind of online shopping is where things are right now. And it is just, I was very [00:18:00] interested in capturing that transition. I was very interested in capturing a sense of the products that we consume, how their image, how their code, how they are very conditioned bodied, some, you know, like when we buy something online, we just get it because not because we hold onto that shirt or us.

Are you able to try on these shoes? We are just buying them from the visuals, you know. And so, I was very interested in the paradoxes of, how the market’s place has changed. You know, instead of going to the square of the town where we would smell the apples, no, I am looking at the tomatoes. This is where it has come to right now.

So, I was interested in capturing that kind of paradox. I am not sure. Hmm, a lot of people, the public got that, but there were ways of being able to access more information. There was a webpage and there are ways of accessing more information about the project, but it was also very visually very.

engaged.

Nir Hindi: We’ll put the [00:19:00] video as well. We let the video as well to the show notes. Then yet, before we continue talking about invention and innovation, let us take a short break.

We are back with Daniel and Daniel you already mentioned before that the styles that you invented, and I am interested to talk with you about those styles after years of research to develop these [00:19:00] flexible led tiles. That allows you to create skins with complex, these curving shapes that you are using, and I am interested.

Why did you develop it? I mean, how was the process of invention? Normally we do not think about, artists kind of going in inventing a new type of led tiles.

Daniel Canogar: No, but artists have always been technological innovators in the past. They improved and tweaked their paintbrushes by trying different kinds of animal and human hair.

They mixed pigments in different ways. You know, there is much more technology involved in the industry of art than we think. Now we think that not just painting is not technological, but in fact, there is a lot of innovation with varnishes, with which our missions would cook. You know, so as an artist that you know was born in the second half of the 20th century and has lived a transition from this kind of.

Post-industrial to fully [00:20:00] digital world. My innovation, my technical innovation, technological innovation, a lot to do with engineering and digital media. And as an artist, I am often asking myself questions that want to look at something that is around us. That is kind of quotidian and turns it around. For example, I have always had as an artist, working with the visual, medium, very interested in.

And screening. Why do screens always have to be square or rectangular and flat? Why can they not be three-dimensional? Why can they not have this conversation with a space that is much more engaging that invites the viewers to see it from different angles? It was just a very simple idea like that. Why not?

You know, why not? Because we will, let us, let us see if we can do this. So then, you know, the whole research process started in the prototyping and the. Fabricating. And in fact, I, the more I read and understand how the Renaissance, uh, workshops and [00:21:00] Florence wore, the more I realized, well, you know, in ours. Little studio here on the outskirts of Madrid.

We have a similar

approach.

Nir Hindi: Yeah. I mean, because when I visited you in your studio and that is, that is a beautiful light thing, kind of maybe opportunity to describe, I remember entering. And then there is, I think the head coach with all your collections of beautiful cameras and there is huge skin all over us.

And you have a group of engineers and programmers. Working over there. And I am positive that that is not the image that most people have of an artist studio. They think about paint on the floor, but you were back then working on this Goya project and you had the muñecas the small dolls of Goya. So very beautiful.

And I like what you say about the Renaissance studio because this is your Madrid studio, but. You have more studios right now; I know that you just open a new one. Where are your studios?

Daniel Canogar: Uh, well,

I only have one other studio and that is enough, um, in Los Angeles, in California as a [00:22:00] center of media and technological innovation.

In fact, Silicon valley in the bay area is kind of moving down to the LA or Southern California area because so many of these companies are now involved in production, audio, visual production. So, I thought this was. A very kind of, uh, I am getting a lot of interest in my work and that part of the world more than say a more traditional art center, which would be New York City.

So, I have this, you know, a planetary bridge between Madrid and Los Angeles and each studio offers different things. I am very happy with the studio that I have been able to create in Madrid. My base, my studio, my art practice have grown from Madrid. There is some very specific. Positive elements about having my center in Madrid.

Nir Hindi: I have a question about this working relationship with engineers. What did you learn about working with an engineer as an artist that comes from, I would say more traditional art [00:23:00] education? How is it may be to work with engineers?

Daniel Canogar: That’s

an interesting question. I have never really been asked that question just so directly.

So, I must think about it a little bit. That is good. I mean, I love it. Perhaps it is not as different, you know, as I, as one would imagine, I think perhaps my artist’s mind is more about creating problems and the engineering mind is more about finding solutions.

Nir Hindi: I

love it though. You did not find it. Cause I always say that artist kind of lead with questions.

Oh, it is it is about formulating questions. Engineering is about end design is about solving them. I love it. When you said creating problems.

Daniel Canogar: Yeah. That is a very short answer. I mean, I am also working with programmers now for all this data work that I am doing. And one of the things that I have learned is to let them be like programming requires a huge amount of concentration.

Uh, you know, that one little calm out of place, small completely [00:24:00] created havoc in the project. So, it is very much about looking at the results, talking to the programmer. Diego his name is, I have an engineer called Diego and a program called geo. So, I talked to Joe and then just kind of stepping away when you work, when he is ready and call me, what do you think of this? But in any case, you got to understand their rhythms. You have got to understand that.

The logic that they are working with may differ somewhat from the logic that one may work with, but there is a wonderful meeting ground creates for a very vital in a brainstorming place. My studio and I also have in part a story, and I also have a financial director that she is a lawyer. And then I have a computer technician.

And then I have an artist and I have an architect, you know, so all these minds coming together, you know, I [00:25:00] say less and less, my work nights, I find myself saying our work, the work of the studio, Daniel Canogar. Because it really is a plural collective experience. I call the shots at the end and I need to do that.

That is what I can offer, but I am very interested in gathering all these ideas as these projects are kind of developed,

Nir Hindi: kind of lead me to another maybe comment. I do not know where, if it is a question, you mentioned that you have a lot of public installations and one of them is the Zachary engineering education complex at the University of Texas.

That over there, they invited artists that work with engineering and technology to have installed their own out in the building. And what did you try to achieve with your work in that building? Which by the way, people, I guess can see it? If they go to the university.

Daniel Canogar: First, this is a very, very significant engineering school in the US and Texas a and M University.

And so, they were building a whole new building and there were [00:26:00] smart enough to commission, several artworks that had technological or engineering aspects, a conversation with the field of the kind of research that was going to happen to the building. What I ended up doing is creating this, uh, one of me.

Curving screens. Um, the work is called pulse and it is in the lobby of this, uh, the atrium of this building, where there is a screen. That sounds like a snake that disappears and emerges repeatedly for the building of the atrium. And you get other visual optical sense of this one continuous ribbon that is traveling in and out of the.

Of the walls and that our work is connected to the server that controls, you know, the building’s temperature. That is like it is a kind of data center for the building. You know, the, you, the electric, the power consumption, you know, when that gets hot outside of the air conditioning goes up. If there is too much water, just getting [00:27:00] overheated, they.

For, you know, all these kinds of self-organizing self-regulating mechanisms that buildings have today that really are almost like human gangs. It is incredible how these buildings are. This kind of smart technology, a self-regulate, the way our bodies, we can self-regulate when it gets hot, we sweat and things like that.

So, I was very interested in from an engineering point of view, making that visible again, because this is something that is hidden in a computer or a rock in a locker room, down in the basement. I was able to tag all that information. And create an abstract animation that depending on, you know, how many people in the building, the work becomes more active, the less active.

One of the things that we track in the artwork is internet traffic. And usually, in the mornings, and particularly this atrium that has a coffee shop, there are tons of students on their laptops. And they are becoming inadvertently part of the work by connecting online. The animation is given much more of a quieter and gentler in the evening hours.

So, it is taking the [00:28:00] pulse of the building. Yeah, it is revealing it. It is almost like exposing the arteries and the veins of this building and a very kind of material tangible way.

Nir Hindi: Beautiful. I mean, you know, it is not only creating motion and flow in the building. It is also giving the visual experience of the pulse of the building.

As you mentioned, you know, you started to say that you have empathy for old technologies.  I am interested in why you have this empathy for old technologies because you also work with very new technologies, which I want to ask you in a second, but I am interested in why this empathy for all technologies.

Daniel Canogar:  I

started becoming very interested in the garbage.

Um, I think it was about 15 years ago. I had this kind of existential artistic crisis. One that artists tend to have periodically out of a sense of loss and not knowing how to continue with my work and my career. This is a difficult time for me. All right. And sorry, just to start wandering around the city.

And I found myself gravitating towards the junkyards and recycling centers and places where things are discarded, abandoned, [00:29:00] broken, and it became very interesting to me without thinking of it as an art project, I started going there taking pictures, hundreds, thousands of pictures, and it took me a while to understand that.

I was starting to feel very identified with these kinds of broken toys or broken whatever TBD players or VHS players, the old model, and as I have aged. And now I am in my mid-fifties, I can now really understand that when the old DVD player is thrown out, This or not because it is all because it is obsolete. After all, it is being replaced by the new model and t, the fact that it has an expiration date, it makes them extremely human.

So, all this work really became about the life and death of these technologies. There is, it is really a reflection of life and death. Of humans and I and being able to ask myself, am I becoming obsolete as an artist, [00:30:00] as a man, as a human being. So, I think also it’s traditional that artists in their middle ages start pondering death and life and how quickly things go by, which they really do.

It is a stereotype, but my God.

Nir Hindi: No, it is beautiful. How you say

Daniel Canogar: and of course, there is a second part to that question, which is not just, it was not just identified that connection that I had, but it was then I started bringing some of these broken obsolete technologies to the studio and I started playing with them and I ended up kind of.

Giving them a new life, giving them a new chance of life by activating them usually with projections and in other ways, kind of reinventing them. And this for me was the exciting part that I think when we throw things out too quickly and I am interested in exploring not only the memories that are kind of encapsulated in these obsolete or broken technologists but also the ideas that we can hack into them.

[00:31:00] And repurpose them and make near use out of

Nir Hindi: your work also in collection, maybe all technologies, you also work with very new materials and you started to create generative art. Basically, it is, I will go with them that they established two sets of the behavior of rules, that process data. I mean, I am interested to hear maybe about this work, but more about what is the role of the artist in this process.

If you are the one that creates the algorithm. And the algorithm creates the art. What is the role of the artist over here? Who is, who,

Daniel Canogar: yeah, that is a good question. And it is a question I ask myself all the time, the tools we use. Influence the results. Like it is the saying, if all you have is a hammer, everything becomes a nail.

So yes, there is a filter. There is a filter that the technologies we use to create and determine the results of the artwork that I create in my case, that is even expanded because I [00:32:00] have the team of people or I am not even doing the old law, the actual algorithm, I am instructing it. I am directing it. I am.

Modifying it via my programmer. Who is also has a lot of input and decision-making in the process? Um, I do also wonder myself. What, what, what, what is, where am I in the project? Where are the technology and the project? Is that a conversation between the human element to me and the more technological elements in the?

Algorithm or is it just a set? You know, I might just give myself a nine. I am just not, you know, we are living in a post-human world where sort of post art world, where the role of the artists is completely being illuminated and in the state. Let us see, no, it is the technology that speaks, I believe to answer it.

Sincerely. I believe this conversation is an important one to have, not just for artists, but for everyone as we’re becoming more profoundly [00:33:00] immersed and more used to working with technologies, we need to be able to understand how they change us, how they affect us, how they change our perspective, how they change, the way we communicate, It’s presence is something that, you know, now in the last few months, in the last two months, we’ve gotten used to communicating, contacting mostly online through zoom calls and I’ll meet you in real life.

I see a sticker behind you on the wall, which I love, but that’s real life. So, we are not so used to meeting real life anymore. We have gotten used to this news. Filter called a zoom or Skype or meet up or whatever you want to call it. And so, I think it is important for us to understand how it changes us. It changes us for sure, but I think that by understanding how it changes us we can make it more ours rather than, and just kind of being used by it.

And that I think is the purpose of art. And that is the [00:34:00] incredible usefulness of art as a tool rather than just accepting, or these technologies, I can kind of respond to them and kind of tweak them and twist them and turn them the way I do with my screens and then and make them more mine. Uh, I think this is something that we all need to do.

However, the way we can respond to it, not just to receive as spectators, to be able to process and respond to this world that is changing so rapidly.

Nir Hindi: Yeah.

Daniel, we are getting to the end of our podcast. And I have one more question to ask you because your angle to data is a bit different from what at least I see in the business world, everyone talking about big data, big data, big data in.

As you said, the problem with data is that there is so much of it. And the question is what we do with that. So, I am interested to hear from you, what is maybe your recommendation for anyone who works with data? How can they make it more human? More understandable, even though [00:35:00] they are not artists, but what they need to have in mind when they think about, okay, I have all this data now, what.

Daniel Canogar: I think that it is important to understand how humans have always processed their environments, how we have not always, oh, this is hard to imagine, but we have not always sat in front of screens for hours and hours and hours that we would walk through forests and walk-through rivers. And we would look at our, you know, our look for prey and we would climb trees and we would use our bodies.

We would use our bodies to feel ourselves around the world. We would touch things. We would smell things. Uh, you know, it was a multisensorial experience. It would have a world. This is still with us. I mean, we do not use a lot of our abilities or cognitive abilities to process the richness of the world anymore.

We were very kind of focused on is optical [00:36:00] screen-based. Way of processing reality, but all this kind of genetic information that we have of how we know we would have roamed and travel and engage with the world is something that I think we could experience in different weather.

It is not just a bunch of charts or. Graphics or, um, I think we need to stimulate other senses. I think we need to create experiences. We need to create experiences of that data. We need to have more immersive experiences of a student. We need to feel the data. We need to smell the data we need to touch the data.

That would be my recommendation. Maybe

Nir Hindi: I can add my recommendation. Maybe should the artists be, should start teaching in engineering school, how to humanize data and make us feel the data I touched the data.

Daniel Canogar: I think

there are always interesting conversations between artists and engineers and me. I love that kind of conversation.

And I truly believe we both [00:37:00] do research different, different results, but they were in there and we are both reading, you know, there is a quest, there is a search. There’s a, an attempt to try to understand and process and have a. Our place in the, in the world, you know, uh, put our feet on the ground and have a perspective on reality.

And that is what we all try to do as humans.

Nir Hindi: Daniel,

thank you very, very much for taking the time in sharing all your beautiful work. Just out of curiosity, where we can find your public works, maybe you can give us two, three places besides the Texas university.

Daniel Canogar: Um, I have,

if you ever fly into Tampa airport in Florida, I have a permanent piece there. It is like this hanging garden, Tampa, Tampa, international airport. I, I mean, have several pieces in corporate collections. I have, I am working on several right now. Um, one infidelity, their fidelity headquarters in Boston.

I just finished that. Piece and that is something [00:38:00] running in December. Um, I am not very good at improvising because I have, I have so many pieces that are right now. I am kind of coming to a blank, but, um, I think the best Peggy best option, if you really want to see the work that I have done and that I am doing is you go to my, go to my webpage, danielcanogar.com.

I try to be quite current with my Instagram feed. I am hoping to share with all of you in this piece. I just finished, uh, for the Nike headquarters in Portland, which has been a very exciting outdoor piece of a conversation piece with Serena Williams and a tennis player.  I am also doing another project with a human cell Atlas and Cambridge, an artwork that is based on this ginormous project.

That is trying to map. Every single cell of the human body and then kind of doing artwork about that. So, lots of interesting projects.

Nir Hindi: Oh my God. I feel that, after you mentioned all those words, now we can have another two episodes only discussing those words. [00:39:00] Thank you very, very much. Have a great 2021.

Daniel Canogar: I wish you the same. It has been great.