Eindhoven – Created by Design Academy Eindhoven graduate Vito Boeckx, Data Church is a virtual reality installation that offers a sanctuary to reflect on our digital behaviour.
Despite continuously contributing to the mass flow of data, most people are unaware of their individual impact and input because such digital exchanges are never made visible. Boeckx says of the installation, presented at Dutch Design Week: ‘I want to make sense of something we cannot see or grasp.’
Visitors to the Data Church are requested to kneel at a Dataism altar while wearing a virtual reality headset. Tracked data from local wi-fi points are then translated into various buildings, forming a VR digital data city. As localised online activity intensifies, large neon-lit skyscrapers grow before the viewers’ eyes, allowing them to travel around this virtual, dynamic urban landscape to fully experience the continuous exchange of information.
As explored in the Foresight section of our macrotrend Morality Recoded, complex digital systems are now central to our lives and there is an increasing need to create visual metaphors to communicate these often intangible concepts.