Molly Morin

1055113200 is a Unix timestamp.  Unix timestamps (popularized on the computing system Unix) are the number of seconds after 00:00:00 UTC on 1 January 1970. Our timestamp, 1055113200, represents Sun Jun 08 2003 23:00:00 GMT, the approximate founding of HASTAC.  To commemorate HASTAC’s 20th anniversary, two DHSE researchers created a data infusion to celebrate all of the labor that has supported HASTAC.  Molly Morin, DHSE’s Arts Researcher in Residence, and Nikki Stevens, a postdoctoral researcher in the Digital Justice Lab, debuted the sculpture 1055113200 at the HASTAC 2023 conference at Pratt Institute. 

1055113200 includes nearly 1,000 feet of dot-matrix receipt paper printed with patterns, icons and imagery made entirely of ASCII characters. Five woven receipt-paper banners held together with a grid of brightly colored yarn hang vertically, covering the full usable height of the wall with intermittent undulations and gathers. The vertical receipt papers sit in front, carrying ASCII imagery printed in black interspersed with UNIX timestamps and the horizontal elements are printed with striped patterns in red that alternate with blocks of git hashes.  On the far left, in the space where a sixth banner might hang, unwoven receipt tapes drape from the wall out into the mechanical structure of a custom-built loom that holds a weaving in process. At the conference, visitors worked with the artists to add to the banners through weaving on the loom. On the right, in front of the banners, a noisy dot-matrix receipt printer intermittently prints out patterns and images that are recognizable from the banners, but often partial or garbled. The printer creates a voluminous, loopy, active pile that sits in contrast to the well-ordered weaving. The work synthesizes an unexpected array of elements and points to a range of of different types of labor, and as it continued to be printed and woven, that labor is ongoing.

Like many all-volunteer networks, HASTAC has been built on the labor of committed community members who often find themselves overworked, underappreciated, burnout-adjacent while still committed to keeping HASTAC alive.  However, this labor is so frequently invisible and taken for granted.  With 1055113200, Morin and Stevens were focused on making this labor visible – able to be seen, felt, experienced, understood. As an artwork, 1055113200 gives material and visual form to a set of activities, feelings and experiences that cannot be clearly pinned down. It honors not a singular event or unified group, but rather the less defined assemblage of people, actions and things that have made HASTAC over the last 20 years. In doing so, it borrows tactics from data visualization along fiber art, maximalism, net.art, and performance. 

This work responds to the long western tradition of monumentalizing great achievements and powerful individuals, engages with contemporary trends toward data, and addresses digital practices in a particularly material and craft-oriented way.  Importantly, this project functions as a data infusion: it embeds representative data about the labor that has made HASTAC into a larger system of representation and meaning-making in which the data is not central or primary, but still integral to the form. Sometimes, when the invisible can be called “data”, the results are called data visualizations – visual objects that help viewers see more than they could, or to understand patterns in data-based activities. Work done by Kelly Dobson, Luke Stark, and DHSE’s chair, Jacquline Werimont, has been called data visceralization: objects and experiences that allow users to have somatic experiences of data – to feel it vibrate, to listen to it sonified. 

Morin and Stevens considered these important, yet divergent, precedents, when creating 1055113200. They did something that was a combination of artistic precedent, aligned with the spirit of data visualization and the creativity/feltness of data visceralization, but they wanted to further interrupt the flattening and erasure, myths of truth or even the “gods eye view” (Haraway) that often comes with a focus on data that includes further abstraction.  Indeed, the labor sustaining HASTAC continues to this moment, to the writing of this blog post, and they wanted to create something that pushed this tradition further back to the auric, wondrous potential that art can provide.