Mimi Onuoha is an artist and researcher that explores the social relationships and power dynamics behind data collection in order to reveal the ways we, as humans, have always been abstracted, represented, classified, and forgotten. Onuoha utilizes print, code, installation, and video to discuss the messay spaces between categorization and collection. She is an active participant at Eyebeam Center for Art & Technology, Studio XX, Data & Society Research Institute, Columbia University, and the Royal College of Art. With her art, Mimi aims “to trouble the assumptions baked into the technologies that mediate our experiences.” Mimi became fascinated with data during her time working on the project titled “*69,” which collected all of Mimi’s catcallers’ phone numbers into a database. She noticed that most people were more concerned with the collection of phone numbers than the problem that led to this collection, men disrespecting women through catcalling. In one of her most recent works, Mimi explores the question surrounding what happens when data is made to disappear by those who want to obscure the reality of racism and power. This solo exhibition was titled In Absentia (2019) and it included mixed media that included data visualization, audio installation, and print booklets. She aimed to answer how to interpret data in both its presence and absence and what is our responsibility both to listening and advocating for racial justice. According to Mimi herself, she describes her work as dealings of the tensions at the heart of the “Information Age,” and an exploration of how societies require “the fluid, organic, messiness of people to be secured, tagged, categorized, and abstracted.”
