This curatorial tour is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Data Fluencies: Tributaries, on view at Or Gallery from May 29 to July 19, 2025.

Please join us for a guided exhibition tour led by guest curator Roopa Vasudevan to explore research and ideas that shaped Data Fluencies: Tributaries. This program is free and open to all.

The second of three thematically connected shows on view across North America in 2025, this exhibition investigates art’s potential for reimagining our often narrow understandings of data and machine learning. Using the river tributary as a conceptual starting point, the artistic projects presented in this exhibition work together to explore the ways that critical, conceptual and creative investigation into the promises and pitfalls of our current understandings of data and technology might feed into broader, community-centred exploration, extending beyond the academic venues in which these ideas are traditionally discussed.

Data Fluencies: Tributaries features the work of six contemporary artists, alongside experimental research supported by the Data Fluencies Project, based out of the Digital Democracies Institute at Simon Fraser University. The exhibition aims to provide open public engagement with the research outputs emerging from the larger project and place them next to cutting-edge and critical work of artists examining the same themes and ideas. Together, the artists and researchers featured here offer us ways to (re)consider our relationships with the data that surrounds and drives our everyday lives—and perhaps find new routes to agency once we are able to do so.