Everything Is Collective is an experimental art collective whose work addresses photography, subjectivity, and power. The group works collaboratively and across mediums and disciplines.
The collective’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including exhibitions at Aperture Foundation (NYC), Royal Nonesuch Gallery (Oakland), Filter Space (Chicago), Nextart Gallery (Gothenberg, Sweden), SF Center for the Book (San Francisco), Utah Museum of Contemporary Art (Salt Lake City, UT), and the Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington (Arlington, VA). Publications by the collective have been acquired by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the School of the Art Institue of Chicago (SAIC), among others.
← Index → Endangered Data, Zachary Norman
Publication, 2018
Following the 2016 election scientists, librarians and laypeople began to backup or “mirror” publicly available government datasets from institutions such as the EPA, NOAA, NASA and others onto private servers and personal computers. This was done in response to a growing concern that this data, much of which affirms the reality of anthropogenic global warming, might be subject to manipulation or erasure. This project is an attempt to visualize this data and its sobering implications. It also presents a method that can be used to transmit information surreptitiously using a crytptographic technique known as steganography.
The images in the books here owe their appearance to steganography, a cryptographic method used to store or hide information within the pixels of digital images. Information from a small subset of data files from a much larger dataset are stored within the pixels of images. The larger dataset is known as the the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center FTP Archive—the CDIAC contains selected data sets relevant to studies of greenhouse gases and global warming. The data chosen for this series were collected at five globally distributed measurement stations—Ragged Point Barbados (13.17°N, 59.43°W); Trinidad Head, California (41.05°N, 124.15°W); Mace Head, Ireland (53.33°N, 9.9°W); Cape Matatula, Samoa (14.23°S, 170.56°W); and Cape Grim, Tasmania (40.68°S, 144.69°E). These stations measure quantities of greenhouse gas species in the Earth’s atmosphere including Methane, Nitrous Oxide, CFC-12, Methyl Chloroform, Carbon Tetrachloride and Carbon Monoxide. There are six books in this series, one for each station and a small text companion containing relevant README files, citations and an ASCII conversion table.
The base image in each book is a photograph of or near the respective measurement station. Stored within the pixels of that image are a year’s worth of measurement data from the respective station. The data was collected between the years 1993 and 2016. Each image represents a single year’s worth of measurement data. As the average amount of Methane in the atmosphere increases each year, the number of pixels used to store data also increases, proportionate to the increase in methane. Therefore, the images become increasingly discolored as the book progresses. These discolorations owe their appearance to the steganography script used to store the data.
The script dictates that each character in a particular data file should be stored in a correspondent pixel in a given image. The ASCII value of that character is converted to a decimal value and this value shifts the color of the correspondent pixel by that amount. For example, if a pixel has a red channel value of 100 and its correspondent data file character is the letter “R”, then the pixel will shift by 82 bits changing its red channel RGB value from 100 to 180, as the ASCII character “R” has a decimal value of 082. The color shifts that occur in each book as the amount of methane in the atmosphere rises become increasingly suggestive of the catastrophic outcomes implied by the data.
METADATA8.5 x 11 inches
215.9 x 279.4 mm
5.5 x 8.5 inches
139.7 x 215.9 mm
Saddle-Stitched
Color & B/W
Digital Offset
Recylced Paper
Issued 2017
Out of print