Year
2021
Tag
Installations
A hammer hits the wall. Another follows at a different interval. The pause is too uneven to settle into a rhythm, but the sound returns often enough to become part of the room. Above the mechanisms, three abusive words identify the streams being monitored. Beneath them, the plaster carries the accumulated impacts.
Online Hate Speech & Cyberbullying connected a Twitter stream to three motor-driven hammers. Language circulating elsewhere acquired a duration, a sound and a damaged surface in the gallery. Visitors could leave the room; the mechanisms continued to work.
Kinetic data installation · 730 Hours of Violence · Mutuo Gallery, Barcelona.
Installation documentation · 2021 · Sound on for the hammer impacts.
Repetition is part of the injury
A hostile message is often discussed as an isolated object: a sentence that can be deleted, reported or defended. Harassment also depends on recurrence. Its force lies in the next message, the return of the same insult from another account, the knowledge that an interruption may be temporary.
The installation gave this repetition a material form. Each mechanism responded to occurrences of a monitored term associated with racist, homophobic or misogynistic abuse. The wall did not return to its previous condition when an impact ended. It held a visible remainder of what had happened.
Words in circulation
Judith Butler’s Excitable Speech provides a useful companion to this encounter. Her account of injurious language attends to the social histories a word carries, and to the power involved in addressing somebody through it. The injury cannot be understood by treating the word as an object detached from its use.
That distinction also sets a limit on the installation’s mechanism. A keyword stream cannot establish the intention of every message: quotation, reporting and the reclamation of a slur can contain the same term. The hammers materialised the circulation of the monitored language. They did not deliver a verdict on each person who used it.
The surface remembers
The 2021 research recorded hourly averages of 120, 720 and more than 1,800 occurrences across the three terms, using a stream that began on 22 July. These historical figures describe the collection behind the work. The surrounding research, including Cardiff University’s HateLab study, examined associations between online hostility and recorded hate crime; an association does not make every online message a direct cause of an offline attack.
The wall offered a different kind of evidence. It could not reproduce the experience of a person subjected to harassment. What it could hold was accumulation: the fact that an incident ending does not necessarily mean its effects have ended with it.
A mechanism that leaves a trace
Three motor-driven hammer assemblies translated the online stream into repeated impacts. Printed supports held the mechanisms against the wall, while the motors and electronics connected to a control box. The wall itself became the recording surface, progressively marked by the moving hammers.
Assembly study · An explanatory reconstruction from the exhibition archive. Components are separated for clarity; proportions are illustrative.
Materials & components
- Three hammers
- Three sets of printed supports and motor mechanisms
- Electronics and control box
- Gallery wall as impact surface
Selected references
- Domestic Data Streamers, exhibition Twitter stream beginning 22 July 2021: published methodology and historical averages.
- Binny Mathew and collaborators, Spread of Hate Speech in Online Social Media (2018 research cited by the exhibition).
- Pew Research Center, The Boundaries of Free Speech and a Free Press (2015).
- Cardiff University, Increase in online hate speech leads to more crimes against minorities (2019).
- Council of Europe / ECRI, Hate Speech and Violence (web resource cited in the exhibition).
- Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997; linked Routledge Classics edition).
Part of 730 Hours of Violence, an exhibition by Domestic Data Streamers at Mutuo Gallery, Barcelona, 7–30 September 2021.
This project received funding through the MediaFutures project, funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 951962. The work reflects the authors’ views; the European Commission is not responsible for any use of the information.
