This waxing yet inherently incomplete constellation of ideas and methods invites anti-capitalist exchange across art and art therapy, medical humanities, and disability studies, serving as a practical and access-minded resource for reclaiming agency outside of hegemonic data practices. While soft data is synonymous with qualitative or phenomenological research, the collected works and attendant recording strategies that form this data/base primarily engage in what Barbara Bolt describes as a performative paradigm in which the art, and its ability to effect change, is itself the research. This is an important aspect of this data/base, as multiple researchers identify as disabled and/or chronically ill artists who use their creative practices not only to record, but to defamiliarize their relationship with their conditions. 

The data/base includes an extensive variety of approaches and subjectivities while maintaining an oft-edited and debated list of limiting factors. Our process is both playful and rigorous. We each advocate for different projects, presenting them via verbal descriptions, links, and shared drawing exercises that result in the site’s illustrations. Included projects are largely reached by consensus but we also reserve majority voting for works in question regarding their applicability to our guiding factors.

Guiding Factors

While these are not absolute and leave room for interpretation, we use these as guides for selecting and writing about works in the database.

1. Confabulatory: The work addresses a dearth. It engages a subject, experience, or condition that is otherwise under, over or misrepresented by other forms of data.
2. Embodied: The work is deeply engaged in a process of discovery and/or deeper understanding through the creation/collection/destruction of data. Experimentation precedes re-presenting or re-telling. The process transcends its own established truths.
3. Transformative: The work stands to transform the artist and/or audience’s relationship with that which it makes its subject using repetition, ritual, or other methods of defamiliarization through changes in scale, location, participation, etc.

We screen-record each 5-minute drawing session and use Cornell Lab’s Merlin Bird ID app to chart visitations from a range of birds. We reach out to artists and estates whose work has been included in the data/base with several follow up interview questions regarding their work and, with their permission, include their responses on their individual project pages, alongside a project link, description, and any additional ephemera they share with us. We also have an ongoing open call and are grateful to have more incredible work brought to our attention.