By Michael Valinsky

Big Data is usually understood as massive data sets that are extremely difficult to manage, store, curate, organize or make sense of. They produce pixelated, blurred and incomprehensible visual representations. But Big Data is also a band that plays very well with their name. 

They’ve come out with a video that exemplifies their name’s definition perfectly: their music video for “Dangerous” links up to your Facebook, ‘hacks’ (or hawks) into your page and reorganizes the images on the screen so that it remains distorted, confused but still, somewhat organized. Your Facebook profile breaks down into its elements, separating tagged photos from likes, comments, profile pictures, random interfaces and syncs the separation to the beat of the song. The music video devours social data and turns it into a hawk. “It acts as a reminder of just how much data we each reveal online,” says Basu.

In fact, this is true – it decomposes your internet self and introduces us to the ridiculous scope of intimacy violations that we purposefully put in place in order to establish this secondary cyber self. The screen is filled, almost polluted with all our “stuff.” It is definitely something worth playing with.

You can find out more info about the band on their blog & listen to their music here.

Yung Jake has made something similar in the past for his song e.mbed.de/d except that this time, the video does not use your social content but mirrors its huge scope by opening up multiple other windows – It basically takes other web browser music videos we’ve seen and carpet bombs them. Vinyl Thief did something somewhat similar with their music video “Faces” where they got people to get together and film the live performance on Instagram. The official music video is made up of multiple Instagram filters…

There are so many different ways of putting things out there these days and not that many people are willing to play with the idea of how things are put out there. It’s interesting to see that bands like Big  Data or Yung Jake or Vinyl Thief can use the tools put at their disposal for outreach and make them into their own product. They appropriate the internet to fuse technology and music.

Follow them on Twitter here.

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