Jareh Das: Where did your interest in bringing together computational data and conceptual art begin?

Ekene Ijeoma: Throughout high school, I was an honors arts student. I drew and painted without learning much art history, as my classes were mostly focused on practice, not theory. In college (at the Rochester Institute of Technology) I studied Information Technology and learned to code. Instead of coding “pragmatic” software like everyone else, I was interested in the poetics of software and started to teach myself how to draw with code. However, drawing with random numbers and algorithms started to feel arbitrary and inhuman. Conceptually I became more interested in drawing from life experiences and using socio-political data and statistics.