Hiscox

Creative Direction takes many forms. I was asked to be Creative Consultant for Hiscox for the commissioning of their first art installation in their new London Headquarters. My role included writing the creative brief, sourcing artist selection, artist panel selection and liaising with chosen artist Julie Freeman during the development and installation process.

Julie Freeman works with natural systems and emergent technologies. Since the 1990s her large scale installations have pioneered her conceptual and critical approach to working with data as a living art material. Exploring climate prediction as a game of chance and of skill, More Than Us offers us a glimpse of the astronomically huge dataspace we exist in.

Two communities of colourful geometric shapes drawn from 'Suprematist' paintings of the early 1900s, congregate, ebb and flow in response to historical and predictive climate catastrophe data sets. Both communities move randomly to find interesting places in ‘landscapes’ created by the data. Engaged in a game of chance, some navigate raw, unstructured data. Others exhibit a more purposeful behaviour as they are driven by pronounced data patterns emerging from an artificial neural network.

At the heart of the ever-changing composition, ‘splinters’ from the ‘data spine’ represent real-time digital transactions across the Hiscox businesses. More Than Us reminds us to think in a more-than-human way, and that even with sophisticated data, chance and randomness will always have a hand in our collective fate.

The climate catastrophe data sets have been built using data from our Hiscox partners RMS and Verisk.