‘Every year, the volume of new information is growing exponentially. What complicates matters further is the explosion of different communication channels. Never before has managing information … been tougher. We’ve entered an unprecedented period of data creation, but it's managing the combination of structured and unstructured data that makes this era truly chaotic.’ How do we get out of chaos?

How can something emerge from the disorder and confusion of the unstructured? This question has been constantly animating the work of scientists, philosophers and artists of all times. Most astronomers, for instance, will tell you that the exit of the universe from the chaos of the unknown coincided with the emerging of spacetime(s) as we know it. For some artists, on the other hand, the condensation of a whole universe into a single work is a question of purely subjective creation. But according to philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the question regards the ‘event’: emerging from chaos is always an event (Deleuze and Guattari 2002: 311).

As Deleuze wrote, the best way to understand what an event is, is to think of an idea: whereas we like to believe that ‘we have’ an idea, it is in fact the idea that comes to possess us, that chooses us, not because of our subjective identities but because of the particular technical capabilities that it finds in us, and that will provide it with the right arsenal to affirm itself and defeat chaos. If we keep following Deleuze's suggestions, we understand that an idea is, in fact, nothing more than a particular connection, a relation. The main example he gives is that of having an idea in cinema: a relation (that can also be a disjunction) between vision and sound, which constitutes the particular rhythm of a film (Deleuze 2003).

The above definition of an ‘era of data chaos’ comes from a source without any ontological or even artistic aspiration. It is an insight on the web page of the Kodak Alaris Business, and its main aim is to illustrate to businesses the necessity of extracting meaningful information from data, presenting this as a universal struggle and offering digital transformation as the main weapon to fight it.