The FOREVER-DO Game: A Big Data Fishing Expedition

The FOREVER-DO Game is a participatory visual artwork, that takes the form of a relational game and installation. It is one outcome from an art science collaboration supported by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre in Italy. The artwork was developed under the theme of ‘Big Data and Identity’ it considers the causal chain that our individual and social actions may have as they flow across the interface of the human and the digital network. The work focuses on data flow that has some correspondence with coordination and communication, as identified by Petri Nets theory. Carl Adam Petri introduced the Nets in the 1970s, they are one of the techniques used today for the analysis of Process Data. When data is ordered in time, the causal chains of data are collected in ‘processes’. One simple representation of a process net is the ‘bucket chain’ used to represent two fundamental aspects of data flow: selection and transfer. By using the bucket chain as a platform this project is focussed on a discipline of data where some ‘causal flow’, possibly represented by nets, has a role in the data analysis game. The resulting artwork encourages the viewer/participant to flow through an installation following a set of rules on a box, their actions coordinate according to the incidence of chance, selection, transfer and the similarity or difference of everyday objects.