A DataMeditation for Climate at MAXXI Museum in Rome

200 people apply, 80 are selected.

Each day, they use a web app (built using Ubiquitous Commons) to express themselves through data which they use to describe their relationship with the environment, as well as a “message in the bottle” for their Other, another random participant (whom they don’t know) with which they form a couple.

Each evening, every participant joins into a data-meditation ritual. The data generated during the past 24 hours are transformed into sounds and visuals: each partipant’s data is seen/heard on the left (stereo channel and side of the screen), while their Other’s is seeh/heard on the right.

Through the experience of their similarities and differences, participants and their Other’s progressively build a relationship.

On the last day, everyone meets in person at the MAXXI Museum in Rome: it’s the final meditation. People attend from all over Italy. This final meditation uses all the data from the previous weeks.

The participants occupy the main hall of the museum for the meditation.

At the end, they have a chance to finally meet their Other and to exchange a gift: a “postcard” (but people have also brought other object, from plants to sculptures they made) describing the voyage they had made together through their expressions and messages.

In the end everyone gathers, discusses and have a party and eat together.

In the following two days, the MAXXI Museum hosts an exhibit composed of

• a Data Story, a data visualization scroll, which displays the data all together
• the Diary, a generative, collective narrative in which the messages that have been exchanged are printed in anonymous form, and that can be used together with the Data Story to read what was going on at the various times
• and the Experience, an anonymized sample data meditation session