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 in the Chrome browser 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. This is version 1.0 'We Need Us' is a work in progress which will be updated with new projects.


‘We Need Us’ was originally commissioned from The Space and the Open Data Institute in 2014. the space logo             the ODI logo