Before stepping into this month's picks, we wanted to share that applications are now open for our Spring 2025 HeyHuman art residency: 3 weeks during May, accommodation & workspace in Barcelona are provided. We’re open to all kinds of projects and backgrounds, across all formats/mediums, at the intersection of data, art or design, so if you’re interested, check out the website to learn more and apply here!

📚 Stories of the month

Fairy tales nourish childhood imaginations and teach us valuable lessons about the world, the human experience, and personal relations, a source of knowledge, discovery and understanding just as meaningful and complete as the physical world. These stories being bound only by the limits of our own imagination opens them up to the outlandish elements often present in fairytales, so it might be a surprise to learn that, in reality, most stories fit within six universal storytelling arcs - and the science (computational analysis of plots with AI & Machine Learning) seems to prove it, as you can read through this intriguing analysis from The Atlantic, drawing upon Kurt Vonnegut’s “Shapes of Stories”.

🛏️ Bedrooms of the month

Sleep transcends our different realities - whether peaceful, adventurous, or sometimes challenging. James Mollison's photographic series "Where Children Sleep” and Adrienne Salinger’s "Teenage Bedrooms" powerfully capture this diversity of experiences, documenting the bedrooms and intimate spaces (or lack thereof) of children and teenagers across the world. This offers a compelling window into the varied places from which children dream and sleep, revealing both privilege and hardship through the most personal environment there is…

🎮 Game of the month

Staying with the bedroom theme—reminiscing about childhood and the uniqueness of our experiences—nostalgia is bound to flow. A Bedroom in Las Piñas is a poetic point-and-click net art piece set in a suburban Manila bedroom in the early 2000s. Through verb-object interactions like touch, pray, and forget, it unfolds as a surreal diary of girlhood, faith, and pop culture. Created by artist and internet dreamweaver Chia Amisola, it’s not just a game—it’s memory, ambient and alive.

📊 Data visualization of the month

Unfortunately, not all childhoods are equally happy and peaceful, and the data proves it. In 2023, we partnered with UNICEF to create the Child Marriage Data Portal, a comprehensive data report for policymakers and advocates working to end child marriage. It highlights the significant progress still needed to meet the 2030 Sustainable Development Goal of eliminating child marriage. For broader insights, explore The Child Atlas - a data resource on children's situations globally, covering everything from under-five mortality disparities to vulnerability across various risks and crises.

🎡 Exhibition of the month

“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”, goes the proverb, hugely popularized in one of the most famous (and scary) movies of all time. And yet there might be some truth to it - games, play, are a universal human need, shared by children (and adults) worldwide, a window for creativity and interaction like no other. The rich meaning of play is exactly what Francis Alÿs sought to convey in his exhibition at the 2022 Venezia Art Biennale, titled “The Nature of The Game”, featuring a selection of films and a series of paintings documenting ways in which children play games and interact, across the world.

Well, this is it, and it is now time to close up again our little time capsule to childhood. But fret not - for it never really ends, does it, the little reminiscences, flashbacks and images of childhood that pepper our everyday… Maybe it’s the smell of young blossoms, or the effervescence in the air - let this springtime take you to memories past, present and future. 

April is the cruellest month, breeding
A love of learning, from the data offspring xx