The Aesthetics of Knowledge

Picture the scene: you’re visiting a popular, new exhibition, meticulously crafted to provoke thought and stir emotions. As you leave, you step back into reality with a newfound perspective inspired by the experience, but after a few polite conversations, and sharing a few snaps of your favourite bits, this magical experience evaporates from your life. Nothing has truly changed in you, just the addition of a few more megabytes of pictures in your smartphone folder. How can this be? 

Over ten years of data-driven exhibitions, we've seen firsthand that art can plant seeds of thought, change minds and grow communities. We’ve also learned that none of this is guaranteed. This is because the true impact of art lies not in the quality of the piece, but the environment in which we find it.

Some time ago, I received an intriguing email from a PhD researcher from the University of Advanced Studies of Social Sciences in Paris, Claudia Cano. We had a brief conversation about her research, and I soon got the feeling that she was onto something crucial for us at Domestic Data Streamers. A few months later, we had the opportunity to invite Claudia to give a small presentation at the studio.  

During her presentation, she shared insights from her research exploring the intersection of aesthetic and epistemic experiences. While these might sound like grandiose academic terms, this is a topic that almost anyone will find relatable and enriching. At Domestic Data Streamers, we have been unknowingly working on the practical applications behind this field of research for a very long time. After all, it is at the heart of our practice: we use aesthetic experiences and artistic expressions such as sound, sculpture, performance or painting to communicate facts, numbers, statistics and complex systems of knowledge.

Our own model of the world

In the quote above, Van de Cruys introduces us to the idea of predictive processing, which, in a very simplistic way, explains how each organism creates its own model of the world, a kind of constant simulation that enables us to predict what is going to happen next, and what we should do about it. To decide how we will talk to someone, we first have to decide which tone to use based on previous experience and the current setting (professional, formal, familiar, etc..…). To make a joke, we need to understand the context of our audience to make sure it lands well and doesn’t cause offence.

However, whilst these mental models are extremely useful for getting through daily life, building relationships, and succeeding, there's a flip side to constantly relying on them. Within these predictive models, we inevitably find embedded bias. Because we can never know for certain what is going to happen, we build our predictions on the closest “source of truth” at hand: our past experiences.. This may be a rich and colourful lifetime of knowledge, but it is minuscule in comparison to the entire history of mankind. It is within these systems that prejudice emerges: for example, given that I was once bitten by a dog, in my mental model, all dogs are dangerous. In that sense, we are very similar to some machine learning algorithms: like them, we are also statistical predictive machines, but at the same time, very much driven by emotions.

Now, don’t get us wrong, predictive models are incredibly useful and necessary, and without them, humans (and all other species) would never have survived. They can also prove to be extremely useful for modelling complex systems, helping us gear our decisions towards likelier futures. For instance, we’ve recently seen research institutions like the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre working on digital twins that produce digital models that mirror the networks within a city to predict behaviours under situations of stress or change. This enables us to anticipate the impact of changes on the real world without its full social, economic, and political cost. This is an invaluable mechanism for reasoning - but at the same time, there’s an inherent risk within trying to subscribe everything that happens to this past-oriented mental model.

What happens when something does not fit our model?

When we are exposed to something that doesn’t fit our mental model of the world, we tend to reject it. This is known as confirmation bias, our pervasive tendency to accord higher credibility and importance to information that aligns with our current set of beliefs. It is a mechanism widely documented in psychological research, and even, in recent years, thought to be a “fundamental property of the way in which the brain drives information search”(Kaanders et al., 2022).  

Above all, it’s a natural reaction: just as we would defend our house from intruders, we try to protect our mental model. If during your first six years of life, you were told that Father Christmas existed, you received presents, and you saw him in the Coca-Cola ads, then receiving the news of his inexistence would be an expensive attack on your mental model. “Are you telling me that parents around the globe are collaborating to deceive their own children? Are they paying for the presents? What the heck?”, you might blast out.  Furthermore, the brain plasticity that you have as a kid is much stronger, so it’s easier to change your mind and adapt your mental model when you’re young (Center on the Developing Child, 2007). This is because children are constantly exposed to new and foreign stimuli, ideas, and modes of thinking, and before shaping their own, they need to have an idea of what’s out there. 

Let’s think about it physically. Say that your mental model of the world is a house, and it has different rooms, each of which has been carefully filled with nice furniture. As we fill and add each room to the compound, we try to make sure that all the elements in this house correspond to a certain unified “style” within the house, thus matching the bedroom rug with the sofa and the bathroom curtain. 

When new information enters the house and perfectly fits with our mental model that is called knowledge assimilation. You don’t need to change anything in your place, just expand certain areas that you already had: adding a new, perfectly complementary piece of furniture to one of the rooms. For example, given that I already like tomato sauce, olives, and pasta, it is easy for me to believe that a plate of spaghetti alla puttanesca will be a delightful gastronomic experience. 

On the other hand, when new information challenges our mental model, it’s a lot harder! That’s as if you were bringing in a new sofa in your place, but you already have a sofa there, it matches with the entire house, and actually, you love it dearly and you inherited it from your grandparents. If you want to install the new sofa, you need to take the old one out, and probably some more stuff to make space for it. This is called knowledge accommodation. This process will always demand that you relocate things in your mental model, changing the architecture, creating new hierarchies, and even erasing some knowledge blocks from your house, perhaps breaking down some walls. These fundamental changes in what you “you know” can be extremely painful and uncomfortable, as it defies the system of ideas you’ve built for yourself, and with that, your ego - thus pushing you, for a brief moment, to dissolve some part of your identity. This process, too, has a name: the infamous “cognitive dissonance”, which is precisely the mental discomfort experienced when someone comes to hold two contradicting beliefs. To return to our metaphor of the house, this is equivalent to “two couches”: for example, one which fits perfectly with the rest, and another which doesn’t at all.

Therefore, in these cases, learning can almost become a form of destruction, in the cases where it challenges past beliefs, if not replacing them. At Domestic Data Streamers, we do often have knowledge accommodation, rather than assimilation, as the real goal, but when we bring challenging information into a new space, we seek to do it in a more enriching way, that can help individuals grow and connect, rather than polarize and demolish past and current convictions. One such way we’ve explored to do this is by using artistic disciplines to curate the right media in order to show information. From physical performances, to digital experiences, we’ve attempted to build a somewhat accessible, universal language where data can be embraced as something which sparks curiosity above all, something you truly want to integrate to your mental model.

In which spaces can you break old mental models and build new ones?

This leads to the big question: in a world where algorithms are constantly reinforcing our own beliefs; and space for real, open debate is disappearing, how can we produce an environment in which our mental model can continue to evolve? The classic political arenas, once idealised as spaces of open discussion and democratic deliberation, are very much perceived as televised theatres where politicians express their most performative selves, giving little space for constructive debate and negotiation with their counterparts. 

But what about museums? Cultural institutions? They fit the bill, but they can be challenging, too. We have been working for ten years now, in these spaces, and the audience inside a museum is always a very specific demographic. Even though we have worked in more than 45 different countries across five continents, most of the people visiting our exhibitions have held similar mental models regarding the topics at hand. Therefore, most of the knowledge they acquire is assimilative, simply an expansion of what they already know and believe. This is not without value, of course, but our goal at hand remains to foster truly transformative knowledge, the kind of knowledge that fights against previous mental models. The challenge, the fun part, is in breaking those uncomfortable truths that demand an effort to find space in your head.

That being said, I truly believe that cultural institutions hold an amazing transformational power, and not just in terms of their economic impact and potential to drive urban regeneration. (Time and again, we see museums constructed in deprived urban areas to stimulate regeneration, take the MacBA in Barcelona (Rius-Ulldemolins & Klein, 2022), or the galleries in Greenwich Village, SoHo and Chelsea in NY(Schuetz, 2013) or SFMoma in SF.) Beyond that, I’m talking here about the impact they can have on people’s lives, as connectors and model expanders. Cultural institutions create transformation through the communities they influence and develop, and the reach of this impact can be greatly enhanced when their contents are brought outside the four white walls of the building.

In 2013, we put together our first-ever project as Domestic Data Streamers. We spent 24 hours in front of a wall asking all passers-by whether they felt optimistic or pessimistic on that day, and we would then paint this information onto the wall to create a real-time graffiti infographic. The wall was in the public square of Tres Xemeneies in Barcelona, a diverse location in terms of social demographics: nearby, there are both public and private schools, it is next to one of the most important night clubs in Barcelona as well as two nursing homes, and it’s a hot spot for tourists, skaters, and of course, graffiti writers. It’s an eclectic space, to say the least. 

Over the course of that day, we had conversations with over 380 people, to gather the data we were visualising. Some just answered and left, but almost 1 in 5 people further developed their answer, establishing a deeper conversation. Some were interested in what we were doing, trying to figure out if there was some ulterior motive or pragmatic goal. Others were captivated by the visual representation of their answers, and the way we were codifying their data into a graffiti wall.

One of the most beautiful moments from that initial experience occurred the next day, however. While I was capturing images of the completed installation, a mother and her two children walked by. Suddenly, the youngest child ran up to the wall, pointed at one of the circles, and shouted, "Mum! That's me!" In that instant, the wall ceased to be a mere surface and instead became a mirror, not reflecting the physical surroundings, but capturing the essence of those who had engaged with the installation.

Following that first installation, we began to bring our projects into cultural institutions, but we quickly realised how different the interactions would be in contemporary art and design spaces, or any kind of public or private institutional setting.* These spaces are ruled by specific ideas and collectively accepted behaviours that make knowledge accommodation highly unlikely. I think that this is a major challenge for curators: how do we challenge the mental model of a visitor in a space with such defined rules?

*However, children's museums, such as science museums, are another whole planet.

A good example of an interesting space for the expansion of mental models are beaches. They constitute the ideal environment for a museum space. When you go to the beach, in a big city, you see everyone: the rich, the poor, tourists, children - almost all of your fellow citizens. Because of that, the beach almost acts as a social equalizer - but putting everyone in the same space, at the same level, it might thus challenge your previously-held mental models of social divisions. Cities with beaches - or with this kind of open, radically universal, collective spaces - tend to me more open-minded, cosmopolitan. 

The context in which information is displayed is key, not only depending on the educational permeability of the space, but also because of the inhabitants and its socially accepted rules. In the last ten years, we have created information experiments in so many different places: prisons, churches, schools, political headquarters (UN), political events (COPs), corporate events (CES, MWC), natural environments, music festivals, art fairs and streets and squares of many cities. From our experience, we have come to realize that the bigger cognitive attention comes mostly from the unexpected moments - for instance, a simple data visualisation made up of candles in a church can be a lot more impactful, from person to person, than a really complex kinetic sculpture in a museum environment. The context in which information is displayed completely shapes and transforms the information you are showing, and how the audience is going to receive and interact with it. 

I would love, one day, to develop a rigorous axis model of “mental permeability”, just based on the location and the information you want to display. With such a visualisation, you could decide whether universities are really good places to break mental models when talking about dietary consumption, or if people are more receptive to talking about climate change when they are in public markets. Until then, this will be just a very broad hypothetical framework.

The aesthetics of learning

Ultimately, we can classify learning motivations into two kinds: extrinsic and intrinsic. Actions driven by extrinsic motivations are done to receive a reward or avoid punishment, such as studying for an exam. These are motivations that are outside of your realm of control. In exchange for learning, you might receive social or material benefits from some external entity. In parallel, intrinsic motivations are understood as learning “for its own sake”. There is no direct reward other than your pleasure or the satisfaction of your personal curiosity. This distinction is key, as intrinsic motivation in learning processes tends to be much more effective, both in the short and long term. When we learn something because we want to learn it, we tend to internalise it in a more profound and lasting way.

That is important to take into account because aesthetic experiences work in a similar way. When we engage in the aesthetic experience, we are approaching “an object” for its own sake, for the pleasure it creates in us or the curiosity that is built on it, without any utilitarian concern. One of the profound insights I gained from Claudia is the idea that these aesthetic experiences, sharing a common foundation with intrinsic learning, offer a powerful means to comprehend the world. As a matter of fact, aesthetic experiences can even be considered as a necessary outcome of learning, and thus a necessary component of any form of intrinsic learning - it goes both ways. Aesthetic experiences enable us to deconstruct and reconstruct our understanding, facilitating a transformative process for reshaping our mental models in more meaningful and profound ways.

An illustrative example of this approach can be found in one of the installations featured in our exhibition, Universal (2020), held at the Exhibition Centre Palau Robert. The goal of the exhibition was to explain the complexities of the health system in Catalonia, encompassing infrastructures, policies, research, and, of course, a lot of data. Understandably, therefore, the content was not an easy read. However, we took on the challenge of transforming each data point into a more digestible form, and there was one particular installation that has stuck with me over time.

This discreet yet impactful installation altered the entire exhibition space. In the first room, there was a persistent dripping sound, like a leak somewhere in the space. It was annoying for those wanting to enjoy the typical silence of such exhibitions, and many people looked upward in an attempt to spot the leak. It wasn't until the fifth room that the mystery was unveiled. In that room, visitors found an IV drip bag, releasing drops over a microphone that reproduced the sound throughout the entire exhibition space. Each drop represented someone receiving assistance in a health centre in Catalonia. The seemingly annoying sound in the exhibition turned out to be a meaningful data point, a form of information that had been subtly conveyed without a clear means of decoding it. The realisation of this fact had a profound impact, causing visitors to pause, reflect, and engage intrinsically with the knowledge out of sheer curiosity.

The transformative power of exhibitions like the one described lies not just in the aesthetic pleasure they provide, but in their ability to challenge, surprise and expand our mental models. By stepping outside the traditional confines of a museum or gallery, and engaging with diverse communities in unique settings, we can create experiences that truly alter perceptions and encourage deep, intrinsic learning. This approach to knowledge dissemination, rooted in aesthetic experience, offers a compelling path forward in a world increasingly cluttered with information yet starved for meaningful engagement. The journey from curiosity to understanding, is for me one of the most meaningful roles that art and design can play. 

Our challenge now is to rethink not only the ways in which we learn, but also the environments in which this learning takes place. By blending art, design, and data in immersive experiences, we both enrich the process of knowledge acquisition and also democratize access to information in a way that is both intellectually and emotionally engaging. This intersection of aesthetic and epistemic experiences invites us to consider a future where learning is not confined to the classroom or the textbook, but is instead a vibrant, ongoing process that occurs wherever curiosity is sparked.

Looking for research collaborations!

I truly believe that collaboration between praxis and research is key to a deeper understanding of our world; the framework that Claudia Cano has shared with us genuinely helps us define our work better, and not only that, it opens a new path toward the quantification of the impact of the tools we have created for very long time. There is an inherent value in the transdisciplinary work between researchers and practitioners, and we will do our best to find ways to build more bridges with research individuals and institutions. If you are interested, ping us up! 

Say hi! →  hello@domesticstreamers.com