What's "Grid(a) Temporali"?
Grid(a) Temporali is a creative exploration of incomplete datasets, culminating in creating and exhibiting an artwork.
The artwork comprises several parts: large-format prints; zines (a copy of a single edition zine tilted (Un)balances: Entangled Destinies); and a process video. The work was exhibited in 2025.
The datasets that the work is based on come from archives detailing shipwrecks and predator-prey dynamics.
The project seeks to better understand the relationship between data and truth.
Who's it for?
Grid(a) Temporali speaks to anyone curious about how data shapes the stories we tell about history, nature, and society.
It will also interest people who find particular interest in shipwrecks, or in predator-prey dynamics.
People who take an interest in novel ways to explore data may also find the work relevant.
Conservation organisations found value in the novel visualisation of data change over time. Designers may be interested in the playful use of a grid to represent time.
Approach
The project combines several design and making skills, from graphic design, experimental image making, and risographic printing. These creative skills come together through cycles of making and reflection. Generative AI was also used to expand on the archival data. Research through Design is the method that holds all these aspects together ultimately leading to the exhibition and the contributions.
Contribution
The prints and zines act as boundary objects to help conservation practitioners, designers, and ecologists to better discuss and critique how stories about the past and visions about the future are constructed.
The objective of this is to help improve discussions and decisions about how data is used to influence the world in an ethical manner.
Alongside, the work also contributes and demonstrates a workflow for working with incomplete datasets by expanding data with AI and producing visual/artistic outputs.
Why is it in the Observatory?
Grid(a) Temporali demonstrates how Research through Design (RtD) can bring together many individual activities such as archival inquiry, graphic design and the use of Generative AI to speculate about the future in a single research project or programme. In this it helped develop compelling new understandings about our changing relationship with data, history, and the future. The project is also an excellent demonstration of the blurry boundary between Design Research and art practice.
It shows how art practice can be part of a Research through Design process.