technical art = translating data (?)

ah so they needed a visual objective graph to show them it was bad, instead of someone saying that a certain part of town was bad, who could have just made it up. (Although the way they represent it is also making it up, coz its translated by their standards) Good point coz the art is raising awareness.. Although even if they had different agendas there would probably still be this 'analysing stuff' theme in there.

I don't want that to be a 'is it art?' question, because that never gets anywhere! It's just noticing this is a bit of a trend, and asking why? Does techno-art need to be statistical at the moment? Fine if the piece you mentioned, the artists were doing a project on crime and people's perception of it, for example. But the packet garden had much to say what it did, but not WHY and things like this go unspoken just because 'it's technical therefore it has to analyse stuff'.

I'm not 'dissing' that sort of thing, coz reinterpreting is good etc.. But the worst thing is for someone to make something like that automatically - Sometimes it seems like it's an automatic thought - technical art = translating data.