About the Film

This data art documentary film follows Smoke Signals, an installation by Ed Carter and David Cranmer, commissioned in 2015. Twelve smoke-ring cannons fire perfect rings into the air, shapes that hold briefly before dissolving, but the spectacle sits on top of a much stranger idea: turning the invisible flow of digital data into something physical, sculptural and audible. It is exactly the kind of subject that makes a data art documentary film worth making, since almost nothing about the process is visible until the piece is running.

Data Made Physical

Rather than charts or dashboards, Smoke Signals turns the internal communications of seven UK arts organisations into patterns of smoke and sound. Each ring corresponds to a distinct communication event drawn from anonymised email data, and where the rings intersect a central subwoofer sends out low-frequency sound that disturbs their shape, echoing the way online conversations overlap and collide. It is an unusual way to make an ordinarily invisible data network suddenly, briefly visible.

A Cipher in the Air

Carter and Cranmer took the Polybius Square, an ancient Greek cipher for encoding letters as numbers, as one starting point for the piece, visible in the structured arrangement of the smoke cannons. The sub-sonic frequencies that propel the rings form part of an evolving sound piece that shifts in response to the data feeding it, each pulse tied to a different exchange, so that the whole installation behaves less like a fixed sculpture and more like a live instrument responding to activity nobody in the room can otherwise see.

Ed Carter and David Cranmer

Ed Carter, based in the North East, works across architecture, sound and sculpture, often exploring place, engineering and sonic experimentation, including ~Flow, his tide-powered sculpture on the Newcastle Quayside. David Cranmer, who works as concrete & robots, is a London-based mechanical instrument builder known for kinetic sculptures and robotic instruments built from electronics and sound, from robotic bagpipes to elaborate mechanical orchestras. Their collaboration on Smoke Signals brings together Carter’s interest in place and system with Cranmer’s precise mechanical craft, two very different practices meeting in a single piece that neither could easily have made alone.

Filming the Ephemeral

Filming Smoke Signals meant working right at the edge of what a camera can hold onto. Capturing the smoke rings cleanly required careful timing and high-speed filming to show each ring twisting and drifting rather than simply appearing and vanishing. The sub-sonic frequencies were just as important to capture, since they register as much as a physical sensation as a sound, and preserving that presence on film needed specialist audio recording rather than a standard microphone setup. Making a data art documentary film out of something this ephemeral meant accepting that the camera would only ever catch part of what the room actually felt like.

About ArtsAPI

Smoke Signals was commissioned by ArtsAPI, a research project led by FutureEverything exploring how arts organisations generate real value through relationships and networks that rarely show up in reports or infographics. Rather than commissioning another dashboard, ArtsAPI backed an artistic response, and Smoke Signals became a way of making that value briefly, physically visible, sound and smoke standing in for something that usually only exists as invisible traffic between inboxes.

Filming a data art documentary film for a research commission like this meant thinking about audience twice over, once for people encountering the installation in the room, and again for anyone who would only ever see it through the film itself. The challenge was making sure the film carried the same sense of scale and strangeness as standing in front of the piece, rather than reducing it to a neat demonstration of a clever idea.