WeightofData

Weight of Data is a hybrid exhibition that explores the speculative significance of digital objects and their spectral materiality in shaping urban landscapes. As cities grow smarter and increasingly hybrid—augmented by sensors, platforms, and algorithmic governance—their operations appear to become lighter and frictionless. Yet this apparent lightness conceals a growing weight, manifested through unseen forces and the infrastructural repercussions of wireless technologies and digital waves. These forces, often intensifying and unevenly distributed, exert a profound influence on reality, particularly in times of uncertainty.

Through the featured artworks, the exhibition investigates the movement of invisible spectres through the city, shaping its hybrid forms, overshadowing urban environments, intertwining with infrastructures, and profoundly impacting urban lives by influencing emotions, trust, perceptions of truth, and decision-making processes. The projects entangle online and offline realms and reflect the relation of digital platforms, their infrastructures, and urban space. They critically examine the infrastructural, political, and affective consequences of living in a networked world, highlighting themes such as platform-mediated reality, systemic control, digital leakage, and the haunting presence of extractive technologies.

Sam Lavigne and Tega Brain’s New York Apartment (2020) merges the entirety of New York real estate into a single listing, aggregating assets from every for-sale property in the city. The work includes hundreds of thousands of images, video tours, descriptive texts, 3D structures generated from extruded floor plans, and a mortgage calculator. In One Star Review Tour (2024), Selena Savić, Gordan Savičić, and !Mediengruppe Bitnik examine how rating systems shape our perception and experience of urban locations. Scraper (2024) by Most Dismal Swamp explores how web-scraping and algorithmic data aggregation fuel a self-reinforcing cycle of memetic redundancy, model collapse, and the internalisation of platform-mediated discourse. Towards Dissolution (2024-2025) is a sound-infused fiction by Anna Engelhardt explores the afterlives of oil, envisioning pollution as a spectral protagonist, using subtle disruptions to shift perception from industrial banality to haunting presence. jiawen uffline’s video essay let yourself leak a little (2023-2024) provocatively exposes how our digital selves—voices, faces, data streams, bodies, emotions—inevitably “leak” through networked systems, highlighting both systemic vulnerabilities and the promiscuous, paradoxical nature of contemporary surveillance and computational infrastructures.

Weight of Data is a reflexive assembly: a show that refers to its own materiality, while also serving as a gathering point of human and more-than-human agents in digital and physical spaces intertwined. It gestures toward the layered ecologies of perception, infrastructure, and interaction that underpin contemporary life, inviting viewers to sense how data shapes, distributes, and haunts environments both visible and invisible.

Weight of Data
A project by Chronus Art Center and a hybrid parallel project to the 7th Lisbon Architecture Triennale, How Heavy is a City?
2025.10.02 - 2025.12.08

Artists: Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne, Anna Engelhardt, !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Selena Savić & Gordan Savičić, Most Dismal Swamp, jiawen uffline

Curator: Xin Bi & Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás

Website Design: OooO studio

Space Design: Daxu Cao

Graphic Design: pageof____

Local Production: Francisco Duarte Soares & FDS- Produção Cultural, Unip

Produced by Chronus Art Center