Hus, 2023

Hus is a 24-hour temporal data visualization of the gender gap in Danish household labor.

Hus changes its expression over a 24-hour cycle to visualize how care work is split between men, women and queer people in Danish society. Each of the three main colors in Hus correspond to a different group of people. Each group has different movements, corresponding to how the data shows that they approach care work.

The amount of time that each group spends moving shows how much time they spend on household labor. Every day, the men rotate for 206 minutes. Women, in comparison, move 243 minutes.

The patterns of movement differ between men and women. Across all iterations, women will be rotating at the same time. This is to show that the type of household labor that women tend to do is is time sensitive, and must happen at certain times. This kind of labor includes, among other things, picking up children from school, cooking dinner and washing dishes. 12 times a day, you will therefore see the women shapes in Hus engage in a cross-iteration rotational choreography.

The movement pattern for men is rather different in Hus. Men do not move in unison across all iterations. They are shown to be engaged in household labor on an iteration-to-iteration basis. Men also move 12 times a day, but each version of Hus will have different timeslots for household labor. This is to emphasize that men in Denmark tend to do household labor that can be moved to another time, if necessary.

The dataset that Hus relies on does not include data for queer people. All of the gendered data is based on hetero couples, but queer people are still included in Hus, albeit in a random manner. This is specifically expressed in the movement of the queer shapes, which rotate for 225 minutes every day, i.e. halfway between men and women. Similarly, their movement pattern is completely random, and you will see queer shapes moving out of unison with each other 225 times a day, for minute at a time.

Like Klyft before it, Hus makes use of the unique temporal aspect of computational art as a data visualization technique. Unlike Klyft, Hus runs on a loop, so that every day shows the same data. This opens up the possibility for extended viewing sessions that could give spectators a complete view of the dataset in a temporal sense.

Hus, however, is not just a raw representation of data. It comes with a certain amount of interpretations. For one, the difference in movement patterns are not explicitly present in the dataset, but are nonetheless highlighted in the work to open up discussions about household labor. The emphasis on different types of household labor broadens how we discuss the topic, which sometimes seems only focused on how much time we spend, and not on what we spend that time.

Finally, Hus brings to the fore discussions about how to work with queer people in research and statistics. People from LGBTQIA+ communities are often left out of research for various reasons, but Hus decides to bring queer people into the frame regardless of what the data says. We are present and deserve representation, even if the dataset refuses to represent us.

Hus was released in collaboration with OFFICE IMPART as part of Node — a platform to explore the Boundaries of Digital Art.

The data behind Hus comes from the report “Hvordan bruger danskerne tiden?” from 2018 by Rockwool Fonden.

Hus is made with Three.js and licensed under a modified version of the Climate Strike License (CSL).