Participants: Kate Rich, Nicolas Malevé, Anne-Laure Buisson, An Mertens
feraltrade.org is the database of artist Kate Rich who organises global food transports since the nineties. Every parcel has a precise identifying number, which is about the only exact field in her database. Kate tries to blur as much as possible the categories of her database, as a methodology of obfuscation that allows to interpret only certain data. This ambiguity shows how the choices of the structure of a database and the types of uses influence its legibility.
However, the participants surprised Kate with the results of their requests. In fact, there are a series of possible readings of her database. In the first place, the locations of departures and deliveries. With the help of the 'geonames' database that gives the gps-coordinates for each place, it was possible to create a logbook of the worldwide journeys. One immediately sees the degree of precision that certain names of places contain, like railway stations, compared to names that don't give gps-coordinates at all.
Look at the geolocations of the parcels' traffic.
Secondly, some classical datamining requests allowed to formulate precise questions with respect to the project, like for example, why the amount of invoices increases till 2007, but radically goes down between 2007 and 2012 ; or whether a list of the ten names represent the most trustworthy providers, etc. As the project is so initimately linked to Kate's life, these observations inspired a participant to compare the digital graphs to the palmistry lines and create a mini-performance about Kate's right hand.