We Need Us

‘We Need Us’ is a living artwork, powered by people, and influenced by data. It is a live, online, animated artwork that explores both ‘life data’ and the life of data. The work concentrates on metadata – data about data - which it draws from the activities of citizen science project, Zooniverse, to create sounds and animation.

Unlike traditional data-visualisation which helps us understand and make sense of information held in large data sets, ‘We Need Us’ investigates the unique properties of the data itself. It asks: if the data had lives of their own, how would they be revealed?

The work is best viewed with Firefox or Chrome browsers on any platform, with headphones or external speakers. If you experience sound or animation problems on your device please wait for the sound to fully load, or/and switch browsers.


‘We Need Us’ was originally commissioned from The Space and the Open Data Institute in 2014. It was re-commissioned by NEoN (North East of North) in 2018 for the NEoN Digital Art Festival, with support from the Open Data Institute. the space logo             the ODI logo