About
Frank Bültge
I work with data. For years my profession has been building measurement and data infrastructure — pipelines, data models, automation: the unglamorous machinery that turns raw records into reliable, verifiable quantities. This site is not that job. It is my public field for experiments — and my practice-based path toward artistic research. What you find here are attempts and first approaches, not a finished body of work.
What it is about
What interests me is what measurement makes visible and what it overlooks — and the invisible infrastructure behind it: sources, standards, computational paths, archives. Out of this come small, ongoing experiments that try to measure something from open data sources, name their sources, and disclose how they are made.
Background
The path toward artistic research is not a new direction for me but a return — yet a path, not an arrival. For a long stretch I did not do artistic research; I worked with data, measurement, and technology. Those years were not a detour: they supplied the material and the craft with which I can now work on the old question in a practice-based way.
Profession as foundation
The professional data practice still matters — as a methodological foundation, not a shop window. It is what keeps a measurement durable, sourced, and traceable. I keep the professional side separate.
Where the real work happens
The finished, crafted work lives in my projects today — datavism.org and parts of data-snack.com. This site is the experimental field before that: preliminary studies and attempts. I will draw the lines to it later.
Stance
Substance before claim, source before interpretation. I assert nothing the experiments cannot show — and not that I am already where I want to get to. Discarded attempts stay visible.