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Ai Weiwei's voice is shrill and rhythmic, echoing against the walls of the Tate Modern. His chants in Mandarin could almost be poetry, but in translation, he is reciting the names of all 5,196 children and young people who died in 2008's Sichuan earthquake in China.
Ai originally created the piece as part of his Nian, or remembrance work, on the second anniversary of the earthquake in 2010. It took the efforts of 3,500 people on Ai's blog and through Twitter to collate the names of all the victims; the Chinese government refused to release any information and was accused of causing the tragedy through badly-built schools and government buildings.
But Ai's new recording, as well as the text names of all the victims, is now being made available to a group of technologists and artists at an ambitious art hack this weekend, alongside contributions from fellow artists including David Hockney, Marina Abramovic and Jeremy Deller. Web inventor Tim Berners Lee has also contributed data.
The video, audio and text data they contribute will be used for the creative coding event. Nearly 150 rival coders and artists will use parts of the data to create their own digital works during an intense 24-hour hack, with prizes award tonight for the winners.
The hack in the Tate Modern's main Turbine Hall is being used to celebrate the launch of The Space, an online arts platform created by the BBC and the Arts Council of Britain.
Speaking by video message Ai, who has not been allowed to leave China since 2012, said he welcomed a new platform for artists to explore. "Let's make an effort: a world with more possibilities and new ways to communicate and express ourselves," he said.
The Space
The event tasks participants with the brief to "take any data and turn it into a work of art." As well as Ai Weiwei's data, other organisations offering up information include the Tate, the Open Data Institute, and the Guardian, which is also sending a team of 14 developers to take part in the hackathon.
The Space will showcase the work of digital artists from across the world, commissioning 50 works a year from artists, both known and unknown, putting out an open call for applications.
"We ask anyone over the age of 18, anywhere in the world, who has a brilliant idea, to send that idea to us," says Ruth Mackenzie, The Space's launch director. "'Out of the best ideas, we'll commission projects, and share them back with the world. We believe in talent wherever it may come, anywhere in the world."
One of the first pieces to be showcased on The Space is a collaboration between Ai Weiwei and Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson named Moon, an interactive digital work on which users are invited to leave their own mark, drawn or written, on a virtual moon's surface. The piece, which will be presented as part of Hack the Space, hearkens back to Eliasson's monumental installation The Weather Project, the very first artwork installed in the Tate's turbine hall.
"It's interactive, which means that anyone anywhere in the world can post their own art," said Mackenzie. "They can contribute to transforming the moon, they can go to the moon in an artistic sort of way. And we hope that we may get the chance to post some work in progress from the hack up on the moon."
The data-driven theme of the hack day was underscored by another backer of the event, the Open Data Institute's Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt. "One of the privileges and thrills of my life is to have worked with Tim Berners Lee, who invented and actually gave us the web, and made it an open space. In the research we do we're trying to develop the next generation of web technology. But Tim's vision, and what we're trying to achieve, was to see the world as humanity connected."
"The Open Data Institute was premised around the idea that data is often described as the new oil, actually it's much more interesting than a fossil fuel. Fortunately it's renewable; in fact, it's a superabundant resource, and one of the challenges will be how we bring our imaginations to bear on using that.
"We understand that visualisation is important, making data beautiful and accessible, but there's a deeper opportunity here. And I think that we see data as an essential part of an artistic enterprise. It's about creativity, and the sprit that animates art is essential here."
• China's censorship can never defeat the internet, says Ai Weiwei
