The Library of Missing Datasets, 2016
bitforms gallery
131 Allen Street
New York, NY 10002
Opening reception: Thursday, February 3, 6–8 PM
Exhibition dates: February 4, 2022 – March 5, 2022
Gallery hours: Tuesday–Saturday: 11 AM–6 PM
Proof of vaccination and masks are required for entry into gallery.
bitforms is pleased to present ITP's Faculty, Mimi Ọnụọha’s, first solo exhibition with the gallery, Everything That Didn’t Fit. Ọnụọha brings attention to the quotidian logic of the technical by highlighting that which does not fit contemporary forms of digital data collection. The artist draws from her own cultural background to highlight moments of absence in techno-colonial systems, moments that offer opportunities for understanding, undoing, and remaking.
"My first real art intervention was nearly a decade ago, when I spent a summer giving every man who catcalled me a slip of paper with a phone number on it.
In a sense, the phone number was mine. But it was also a number I had connected to a distant server and pre-programmed to respond to any messages it received with stock handcrafted replies. These messages ranged from maudlin to indignant, but in that time before bots and smart home systems, it felt liberating to program a computer to send words I couldn't bring myself to say out loud. As the summer went on, the words the men sent me in return—messages that were alternately apologetic and dismissive—stopped mattering. What became more pressing was the artifact that emerged from the project, a thing I had never set out to create: a list of all of my catcallers’ phone numbers.
What appeared a simple list was so much more. That dataset held the sweaty dread that gripped me when I approached the men, the intimacy of watching halfway-programmed conversations with strangers spring to life before my eyes; the dark thrill of feeling like I finally had the upper hand by forming these men into a list I could pretend to control; the doubt in wondering if it was fair to have it in the first place.
And of course, the understanding that no one else would ever know the weight the dataset carried for me. To anyone else, it was just a list of numbers. To the men caught up in it, it was a grouping they didn't know they composed.