by Hristo Yordanov, originally written in 2020, revised for publication in 2026
Introduction
Every artwork involves a system of measurement. Not always numerical, not always visible, but always present. The choice of material, scale, duration, medium – each decision implies a framework of values, a set of criteria by which the work will be judged, communicated and understood. As Miya Yoshida observes, artists adopt diverse strategies in this process: chance, discipline, readymades, mathematical axioms, acts of counting, written instructions, or the displacement of objects. The measure is rarely the point of the work, but it is always part of it.
In the digital age, measurement has taken on a new and troubling dimension. The binary language at the foundation of all digital systems – the alternation of 0 and 1, on and off, presence and absence – is the simplest possible measure. But from this foundation, systems of extraordinary complexity have emerged that now permeate every aspect of contemporary life, and which increasingly shape the conditions under which art is made, distributed, seen and valued.
This essay examines what it means to make art in a culture saturated by invisible measurement – where data is currency, attention is harvested. The tools available to artists are the same tools used to surveil and control populations. It argues that some of the most interesting contemporary art practices are work that makes these invisible systems visible, turning the instruments of digital measurement back on themselves.
The Measured Life
We rarely notice how thoroughly we are measured. Every search, every click, every location check-in generates data that is collected, processed and traded by systems largely invisible to the people who produce it. Geolocation data establishes where we have been. Behavioural tracking establishes what we desire. Algorithmic profiling groups us into categories that determine what we are shown, what we are charged and sometimes what opportunities we are offered.
The advertising we encounter online is the visible face of this system. What remains invisible is the infrastructure behind it – the data brokers who aggregate and sell personal information, the AI systems that process it, the commercial relationships that connect our browsing habits to political campaigns, insurance pricing and credit decisions. As the Tactical Tech collective documents in Confessions of a Data Broker, personal data has become one of the most valuable commodities of the twenty-first century, traded in markets that most of us have never heard of and cannot access.
This is not an abstract concern for artists. The same digital infrastructure that measures audiences and markets also measures artistic reputation, exhibition visibility and cultural relevance. The metrics of social media, streaming platforms and online search determine which artists are seen and which are not. The digital measure is not neutral. It encodes existing power structures and amplifies them.
Ami Clarke and the Art of Financial Measurement
One of the most rigorous explorations of these themes in recent contemporary art practice is the work of London-based artist Ami Clarke, whose exhibition The Underlying was shown at arebyte Gallery in 2019. Clarke’s practice sits at the intersection of digital systems, financial markets and ecological crisis, using the tools of data analysis as both subject matter and artistic medium.
Her video work Lag Lag Lag performs a live examination of online news to identify references to Bisphenol A (BPA) – a synthetic oestrogen used in plastic manufacture that has been detected in water supplies, soil and human bodies worldwide. The work connects this molecular-level contamination to the movement of financial markets, tracking, in real time, the share prices of the 100 most polluting corporations on the planet. The result is a kind of involuntary portrait of capitalism: a live feed of the relationship between environmental damage and investor behaviour, rendered visible through the same data tools that financial markets use to make their decisions.
What makes Clarke’s practice particularly compelling is the precision of its methodology. She collaborates with specialists, including a former financial broker and a software engineer, to build technically authentic work – not a representation of financial data systems but an actual engagement with them. The work does not illustrate a critique of capitalism so much as inhabit its own tools, turning them towards purposes they were never designed to serve.
This raises a broader question that runs through much of the most interesting digital art practice: what happens when artists occupy the systems that are normally used to measure and control them?
Sweet Dream Factory: Dissecting Corporate Opacity
My own video work, Sweet Dream Factory (2019), approaches similar territory from a different angle. The work investigates the Tate & Lyle sugar refinery in East London – a building that has shaped the surrounding landscape, economy and environment for over a century, and that shares its name with one of the world’s most prominent contemporary art institutions.
The connection is not accidental. The Tate galleries take their name from Henry Tate, the sugar magnate who founded the company before donating his art collection to the nation. The sugar industry’s history is inseparable from the history of colonial exploitation and the transatlantic slave trade. The refinery that still operates in East London carries that history in its walls, though the corporate world, understandably, does not volunteer this information.
The video work attempts to make a dissection of the factory – to strip away layers of corporate presentation and see through the walls to what lies beneath. Through layered imagery, data overlays and archival material, it asks what impact an industrial operation of this scale has on its surrounding environment, and what the relationship is between cultural philanthropy and industrial extraction. The answers remain partial and speculative – corporate opacity is effective – but the act of asking is itself the work.
The Demoscene: Radical Compression
Against the backdrop of data surveillance and corporate opacity, the demoscene represents something quite different: a tradition of radical compression, technical virtuosity and communal generosity that has operated largely outside the mainstream art world since the 1980s.
A demo is a real-time audiovisual program, typically constrained to an extremely small file size – the most demanding category limits work to 64 kilobytes, smaller than a standard email. Within this constraint, demosceners create animated three-dimensional environments, generative music and complex visual effects of extraordinary sophistication. The constraint is not a limitation so much as a form – a measure that generates rather than restricts creativity.
The demoscene is significant in this context for several reasons. First, it demonstrates that the digital measure can be turned towards beauty and craft as readily as towards surveillance and control. The same mathematical understanding that enables data harvesting enables generative art of genuine complexity and originality. Second, the demoscene operates on principles of openness, knowledge sharing and technical collaboration that are the direct opposite of the corporate black-box model that characterises most digital infrastructure. Third, and perhaps most importantly, demo culture produces work of real artistic ambition entirely outside the market systems that normally determine what is valued and what is not.
As explored in an earlier essay on this site, the demoscene group Fairlight – founded in the early 1980s – exemplifies this tradition. Their work, created under conditions of radical constraint, retains a formal and technical ambition that continues to influence generative artists working today.
The Digital System as Artistic Medium
What connects Clarke’s financial data works, the Sweet Dream Factory investigation and the demoscene tradition is a shared understanding of digital systems not merely as tools but as material. The algorithms that measure, sort and value human behaviour are not neutral infrastructure. They embody specific assumptions, power relations and economic interests. Making art with and through these systems – rather than simply representing them – is one of the defining possibilities of contemporary digital practice.
This is different from art about technology, which has existed as long as technology itself. It is art that operates within the logic of digital systems while refusing to be fully captured by it – that uses the language of measurement to ask what is being measured, by whom and for whose benefit.
The question Cristina Venegas asks about Cuban digital culture applies more broadly: as digital infrastructure becomes the dominant medium of social, economic and cultural life, the question of who controls that infrastructure – and who can subvert, evade or repurpose it – becomes increasingly urgent. Artists working with code are not simply making a stylistic choice. They are engaging directly with the systems that shape contemporary life.
Conclusion
The digital measure is everywhere and mostly invisible. It shapes what we see, what we are offered and increasingly what we believe. It determines which artworks are discovered and which remain unseen. It trades our attention, our location and our preferences as commodities in markets we rarely think about and cannot easily exit.
The most interesting response to this condition is not refusal but engagement – art practice that inhabits these systems closely enough to understand them, and that uses that understanding to produce something that the systems themselves could never generate: genuine critical insight, expressed with formal intelligence and human presence.
The mystery, as this essay began by noting, is a form of measurement too. The best art resists easy decoding. In a world where everything is measured, the unquantifiable is a form of resistance.
References
- Clarke, Ami (2019) The Underlying. arebyte Gallery, London. amiclarke.com
- Tactical Tech (2016) Confessions of a Data Broker. vimeo.com/163564618
- Venegas, Cristina (2010) Digital Dilemmas: The State, The Individual, and Digital Media in Cuba. Rutgers University Press, p.66.
- Yoshida, Miya, Draxler, Helmut and Clough, Patricia T. (2018). Towards (Im)Measurability of Life and Art. pp. 183-192.
- Yordanov, Hristo (2019) Sweet Dream Factory. Digital video. hristo-yordanov.com
