Dark Knowledge: In an Ideal World
This is a story about gaps and silences in housing and land data, told through the metaphor of space travel.
We worked as part of the Data Stories project at Maynooth University to make a creative response to ongoing research into the way data is gathered and handled within the housing system in Ireland. During our year working with the project in 2025, we ran a series of workshops with 50+ housing professionals, researchers and policy makers in Dublin. The workshops used a metaphor of space exploration to examine the knowns and unknowns of the housing data system. Using metaphor helped us have conversations in a different register, to get beyond the minutiae of the way we normally talk about housing data issues.
These workshops were audio-recorded for research purposes, but we decided to also use the recording transcripts as the starting point for making a creative piece. The audio recordings were transcribed (very imperfectly!) by AI, and we worked with these unedited transcripts. We cut and pasted fragments of the transcribed audio from the workshops to assemble a new narrative. Every word of the dialogue (in black and grey) that you read in our story has been pieced together using found phrases that we lifted from the transcripts. The text we were working with included some surreal hallucinations and repetitions, where the AI invented strange characters (‘The Ferv’, ‘The Equality Children’, ‘The Milk Dogs’, The Grey Guys’) or got itself stuck in loops and repeated phrases over and over again. We decided to keep the errors made by the AI and incorporate them directly, because we are interested in the role of technologies in mediating information about land and housing. We enjoyed working with AI in a way that emphasises its potential for absurdity and disruption. The only things we have directly authored ourselves (that haven’t been lifted from these transcripts) are the blue italic sections that help set the scene, and certain character names which we have invented or replaced to protect the identity of anyone mentioned by name in the transcripts.
What has resulted from this process is a story that uses the metaphor of space travel to explore some of the questions raised about how we approach data gaps and silences: What is out there that we don’t know or can’t recognise with our current data systems? What are the different incentives, desires and fears at play in our searches for ‘clean’ and synthesised data? Is the ambition to synthesise all data a futile one?
Even though the words from the transcripts have been cut out, taken out of context and rearranged, we believe that what we have ended up with presents an interesting, absurd commentary that can contribute to the continuing discussion about data within, and beyond, the worlds of academic research and housing.
Our story may not perfectly dissect or analyse the research issues, but may illuminate questions from new vantage points. The analogy of space exploration is only one way of thinking about the gaps and silences in data, but it has allowed us to approach these issues with humour and a playful sense of creativity, opening up issues that the researchers are facing and giving them a shape.
Read the full story here
More About the Project:
My collaborator Ella Harris and I have been working with the Data Stories project at Maynooth University on a year-long residency throughout 2025. Our role as artists is to work closely with researchers within the project, looking at two case studies which explore different themes within housing data in Ireland. We will be producing two creative pieces, one per case study, to translate the findings of the research into engaging formats.
The first case study is in partnership with the Central Statistics Office (CSO) and focuses on gaps and silences in housing data. For this we ran 2 workshops at the CSO headquarters with more than 50 housing experts, policy makers and academics, to explore the idea of data gaps using the metaphor of solar systems and space travel. We asked attendees to map the knowns and unknowns of the housing data solar system in small groups and audio-recorded their conversations over a total of 11 hours of workshop time. This audio was transcribed, and from these transcriptions we are extracting narratives about data gaps, to create a digital comic that explores the issues raised, through the metaphor of space travel.
The second case study focuses on commodity narratives and desire within housing data, and for this we will be producing an i-Doc that takes the form of a property listings website, with interactive games that invite the audience to engage with questions about desire, and choice.
Curious about working together?
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