When Data Draws a Blank: Mimi Onuoha's "Everything That Didn't Fit"

In the late stages of the Information Age, the convenience of technology has given way to a restless hand-wringing over digital privacy. As our lives migrate online, so too do the data points that define us. But even as deep anxieties swirl around the overabundance of digital information, there remain persistent gaps and absences in how data systems represent many people and communities. Where one community is preoccupied with individual privacy, another may be left behind by the modern methods of data collection. How do we move toward a more equitable world when the technology of today neglects the communities on the fringes?

In Everything That Didn’t Fit, a new bitform exhibit from NYU Tisch ITP alum and former visiting professor Mimi Ọnụọha, the multimedia artist and researcher traverses physical and digital spaces to bring into focus the people and stories who are repeatedly left out-of-frame. She revisits a century-old W.E.B Du Bois research report on Black rural life (“In Absentia”), probes Black women’s proximity and relationship to data via a series of photo prints (“Natural: Or Where Are We Allowed to Be”), and uses installations to make tangible the data erasure that is obscured by complex technologies. 

In every case, we see that these absences disproportionately affect Black, queer, and immigrant communities. Working together to unearth these gaps, Ọnụọha’s diverse collection becomes an almost overwhelming depiction of who has been left out, and how these socio-technological systems fail to paint a full picture. We recently spoke with Ọnụọha to discuss the origins of her research and artistry, the challenges in visualizing the abstract, and how she glides between mediums to tell stories.

Learn more about Mimi Ọnụọha’s exhibit Everything That Didn’t Fit, showing at bitforms through March 5.

You work between incredibly disparate forms, regularly bridging the gap between data and information and multimedia storytelling. How did your background propel you on this journey to ITP and toward your current work?

Mimi Onuoha: I think a lot of it can be traced back to when I was in [undergraduate] university. I majored in anthropology, and you can sort of see that I have a very anthropological lens. That was my [avenue] to thinking about making sense of the world in a particular kind of way. When I was in university I remember I had to write a thesis in my final year…and I wrote about digital platforms like Facebook and what it was like expressing grief online. The ways that people at the time were showing [grief] were different from the patterns that had come before. The whole thesis was thinking about this space: the recently possible, and then what that had to do with underlying cultural values and social structures.

At the time I did that work mostly on my own. I had this amazing advisor who was saying, “This is important work,” but there wasn’t a field or department at the school that was doing that [type of research]. The reason I went to Tisch is because I had this sense that I had been thinking and talking and experiencing a lot of these digital platforms, but maybe there was something I was missing if I didn’t actually know how to create some of them. So, I went [to Tisch] because I thought I can learn how to code in grad school if I go to ITP [laughs]. I found the school randomly online because I searched how can I learn to code…

I think people struggle to move beyond the abstract when it comes to data. How do you hope your work can help visualize and make real the absence or erasure of people and communities within data collection and systems?

Mimi: Through visualization and experience and as many different forms as possible. To me, I had experiences where I could see and feel very clearly how data collection is an expression of a relationship. In quite a bit of my work I’ve been trying to take these things that seem very abstract and up in the air, and actually ground them so they are real and concrete. Once they are in front of you, it becomes a lot easier to start thinking about what it means and why it matters. 

Two of your pieces, “In Absentia” and “Natural: or Where Are We Allowed to Be,” convey the legacy of data collection. How can looking back help drive home the scale of these problems?

Mimi: There’s something that is [both] reassuring and deeply chilling about In Absentia for just that reason. It is odd to think that some of the same questions that folks are grappling with today, W.E.B. Dubois and his team were grappling with over 100 years ago. And people are still ending up with some of the same answers. That was a lot of inspiration for that piece in particular. I love doing work that is about these sociotechnical systems because it really is work about everything that is underneath them—what they come from, what they emerge out of, what they’re built on top of. If you just keep looking at the same spot, then you start to see that. But if you don’t look very deep, it comes very easy to not see that and just take the data as it is on the surface. 

I find that technology is meant to be future-facing, and is supposedly about sophistication and advancement, [but] I often find a lot of answers by looking towards the past. 

Why is it important for you to work between materials and mediums, and how does that help you better depict the problems within these deeply complex systems?

Mimi: It’s hard to make work about systems, but fundamentally I think a lot of my work is [about that]. It’s almost like you have to approach it from all of these different perspectives and views to get a sense of the vastness—and also the specificity of them. I used to, when I was younger, think it was very foolish to be an artist without a clear medium. So I was like, “This is not a good idea, this is terrible” [laughs]. But from the perspective of making sense of the world it’s fantastic, because it means I can put on different hats and think about things from different points of view.

I find that when I’m in one space, like I’m making an installation, and then I’ll come up against something—I’ll hit this wall. And then I’ll switch to a different medium, and it’s like something else can emerge from this. It’s the same reason I make a lot of different versions of pieces, too. There’s always more; let’s now turn this around and flip this and look at it from a different perspective. I think that’s what the times we’re in calls for: a multiplicity and fluidity and flexibility. 

Through this experience, what have you learned about your own work and your methods of presentation?

Mimi: It’s the first time that I’ve had so much work all in the same room, and I feel like I have learned something more about the conversations between pieces. The color that I chose for the exhibition is this rust or dust color. I was trying to recall the color of a particular shade of the ground in a particular part of Nigeria. I was trying to bring that to the wall. And whether I got it or not, I think it evokes it, and it’s something that so many people have commented on that grounds the work. It’s such a small thing, but it [suggests] the same experimentation and playfulness that you get from being in different formats. So having it all in the room is different; it brings out something new. That’s been really incredible for me to see… I feel really grateful.