256M (external link)
256 million colours of violence
About Data Vitality
‘256 Million Colours of Violence’
Survey-based interactive archival research project and installation
Ali Akbar Mehta
256 Million Colours of Violence is a survey-based interactive archival research project, inviting online
and onsite audiences to participate in a performance to actively co-create the website’s archive of
colours that represent ‘violence’. By transforming the commonplace survey questionnaire into a diverse communication interface, it subverts problematic usages of questionnaires as bureaucratic tools for data collection. With particular emphasis on questions of gender, sexuality, class, and citizenship, it reveals the presence of violence in routine everyday questions and everyday life, providing unparalleled glimpses into complex cosmological relationship of ourselves as both victim and perpetrator of violence and trauma surrounding us.
Ali Akbar Mehta is a transmedia artist, curator, and researcher currently pursuing doctoral studies at the Contemporary Art department, Aalto University, Helsinki. His practice consists of formulating new archival structures and logics to investigate memory, histories, identities through the lens of violence, to create politically conscious archives for the future.
