the project
Somewhere, an instrument measured something every day for years. I didn't do that work. I took it, and grew a creature from it that lives as long as the measuring lasts. Some I let die on the day I stopped looking. Others die on their own, the moment their source stops breathing.
Datum is an ongoing art project that turns datasets into living organisms. Not charts, not visualisations in the usual sense, but creatures: forms that are born, grow, carry scars and die, entirely determined by the numbers that feed them.
Each organism gets its own mock-scientific species name in the tradition of biological taxonomy. To take one specimen: Datum ventosa, the windy Datum, was grown from years of wind measurements at a single weather station. Every new dataset breeds a new species, and slowly an invented natural history of the information age takes shape: a made-up kingdom of creatures that never existed, each telling a true story.
The form of each creature is never decided in advance. There is no mould. The organism grows point by point, measurement after measurement, each new value deciding where the next shoot bends. In Datum ventosa, for instance, the wind direction physically pushes the growth one way, the wind speed decides how far a branch reaches, and every storm forces a split; another dataset steers another way entirely. The result is as unpredictable as a real tree: feed the system a different piece of data and a creature grows that resembles no other.
Beneath the work lies a diagnosis. We live in a time where value has been decoupled from effort. Nobody gathers anymore; we harvest other people's persistence, from sensors, institutions, machines that record for years with unshakeable discipline. Datum makes that decoupling visible and tangible. By hijacking someone else's stubborn years of measurement and growing something living, something seemingly meaningful, out of it in seconds, the work demonstrates exactly how modern value is made: not by doing, but by reusing.
The illusion of persistence is not a trick to save labour. It is the subject itself. The creature wears the appearance of years of patience while the maker only pressed export.
At the same time the work touches the breathless rat race we are all caught in. The organisms have to keep being fed to stay alive. If the source stops, the creature dies, not from disaster, but because the attention fell away. That is the quiet cruelty of our age, reduced to a creature on a screen that stops moving.
And there is the cause of death. Here the work splits in two. Some creatures die because the maker decides: Datum ventosa, to take one specimen, dies on 4 June 2026, not because the weather station closed, it goes on measuring quite happily, but because that is the day the maker pulled the data in. There the artist is literally the cause of death; whoever makes, decides when the life stops. Other creatures the maker has no such power over. They hang on a source that still breathes, a seismograph, a weather station that keeps reporting, and they live as long as that source keeps feeding them. When the measuring stops, they die, and nobody chose the moment. One death is a verdict, the other a silence. Together they ask the same question from two sides: does this creature live because someone is still watching, or because something is still being measured, and is that difference really so large? That is not a technical aside; it is the core.
Datum stands in a recognisable line, even though it started from nothing. Reusing someone else's gathered material as raw matter for art has a history in appropriation art. The deadpan presentation of the impossible, an invented taxonomy behaving like real science, breathes the spirit of Panamarenko, who built aircraft that didn't need to fly, and of Magritte, who showed and stayed silent. Persistence as material, the endlessly sustained gesture, echoes Theo Jansen and his living machines.
But where Jansen builds for thirty years himself, Datum inverts that: it claims the persistence without supplying it. That is where the bitter, contemporary point sits. The work is not a tribute to patience, it is a mirror for a culture that has outsourced patience.
Each organism lives on a screen. You can play its whole life, pause, speed it up, or use a timeline to move to any moment in its existence: the birth, the storm that left a scar, the last breath before death. Because each creature has a clear, grown form with a silhouette, it can also be frozen and printed, like a fossil, a print, a cast. The moving organism and the still image are two forms of the same life.
The system is reproducible. Any dataset, whether it records a human life, a river, a currency or a market, can produce its own species. Datum is therefore not a single work but a method: a way of handing the invisible labour locked inside data back to the eye, as something that breathes and then stops.
Jurgen De Wever works on his own at the crossing of strategy, language, code and concept. Datum is his first work as a visual artist: not born from a craft or a studio, but from a way of thinking in systems, and a lasting fascination with makers who take the impossible seriously. The project is in development. Datum ventosa, grown from years of wind, was the first specimen. Since then the kingdom has grown to around a dozen species, grown from mortality figures, market prices, dog bites, war, air quality, earthquakes and rain. Some dead and fixed, others still alive on a source that keeps measuring.