Visualizing Data: Seeker's Affective Interaction

Seeker is an interactive data-mapping media-art installation, created by Leon Cmielewski and Josephine Starrs, that won an award of distinction at Ars Electronica in 2007. Made for three large screens, it explores the themes of diaspora and displacement under late-twentieth and early twenty-first century capitalism. Seeker combines dynamic content with the deep immersion of its cinematic scale and content. The use of cinema is matched by the historical patterning of the work's themes. Blood diamonds, oil, dictatorships, war, terror, and refugee counts are all tracked as data flows of people, money, economics, geopolitics, and power across two large, affective screens. One screen shows evocative landscapes of vast depeopled spaces (sites of ancient civilizations such as Lake Mungo in outback Australia). The other screen shows teletext news of refugees lost or found layered over aerial images of cities tracked by Google Earth's view of places from or to which people are escaping.