Database Logic(s) and Landscape Art
Brett Stalbaum, C5 corporation

Multiplicity of the local: Applications of database logic in the landscape
[4/5]

Though only a starting point (again, the situation aesthetically regarding
the axial nature of our semiotic context is not so clear), we can
nevertheless posit that the nature of place undergoes a motor
transformation (because calculable by machines) as the precession of
semantic models allows the topographical, geological, statistical,
geophysical-archeological, and historical relations between different
places to be navigated paradigmatically (the model) instead of
syntagmatically (the narrative). In addition to enhancing scientific
endeavor, it also opens spaces for aesthetic exploration via algorithmic
techniques that are impossible if one is dedicated to romantic or
modernist journeys of exploration of the type that reached their zenith in
Lewis/Clark (or Albert Bierstadt) and Hillary/Norgay (or Richard
Diebenkorn) respectively. An alternative area of artistic inquiry into
place becomes its relation to other place, even if not through any obvious
geographical relationship. It is even possible that relations discovered
may not even be practical in an exploitative sense, but they would be no
less actual relations simply because they did not yield a new pocket of
crude oil or some such. As a result, aesthetic value changes from that of
the landscape's own value as individual space (either beauty, desolation,
the sublime), and moves toward a relationship with multiple others.
Culture swerves from Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals toward Deleuze and
Guattari's Geology of Morals.

For example, geologists use geomorphic similarity to classify the origin
and history of similar rocks found different geographic locations. Such
morphological relations emerge through similar general processes of
formation; attractors or abstract machines. [37] In the landscape,
topologies are also expressed through influences of their emergence
through various general processes, (such as stratification, meshworks,
replication, and perhaps autopoiesis given what we suspect about the role
of data in the landscape), all of which can be modeled and searched. This
makes possible the search for an almost limitless variety of 'other'
relations, other shores, other paths, other mountains, and other
topographical others that are manifest because their formation was
organized around similar topographic attractors. Database becomes a both a
context and a tool for exploring the relations between landscapes from
arbitrary locals. This alone is adequate grounds for exploration and
activity. C5 is interested in more speculative territories as well, such
as the issue of how database might serve as a context for exposing
unobserved attractors and behaviors; no less than the subject-less
informatic relations that may suffice as solutions to questions we have
not yet formed.

Perhaps the clearest early example of a paradigmatic influence related to
GIS can be found in the Degree Confluence Project [38], which is perhaps
surprisingly not an artist driven project, though it is more like an
artwork than many artist driven projects. [39] By identifying points (the
confluences of integral latitudes and longitudes), and encouraging people
to use GPS devices to find these points on the earth, narrative (the story
of getting there) emerges as secondary to the model (the arbitrary choice
of Latitude/Longitude over the Universal Transverse Mercator system for
mapping locations on the Earth). The mapping model, even if in a trivial
manner, becomes the primary and very compelling [40] agent of the
performance. The narratives come after the (re)discovery of place through
the abstraction of the map, rather than the exploration of place in order
to create the map itself.

The narratives produced by the Degree Confluence are database alternatives
to romantic and modernist narrative, instantiated as they are by actual
database logic. The confluences in this case are even rounded to an
integer value, which may only be a matter of conceptual convenience, and
of course the convenience of those reading the intersections of lines on
their maps. But it is tempting also to think of it as a specific issue of model
and database culture: the corresponding field in the table can be
specified as the type SMALLINT to save disk space. (No floating point to
store.) The choices made in the reordering of narrative are no longer at
issue for the participants, or for the creators of the work. The map is in
command here. The only choices in evidence are tactical ones: it is all
about getting yourself to a point that was chosen for you by the model.
This would not be conceivable without some instability in the semiotic
axis, or precession of semantic models. Failure to explore such
possibilities on the part of contemporary artists working with landscape
would amount to artistic malpractice. To ignore the contemporary database
logics and their impact on aesthetic developments in culture at large is
akin to riding a horse to work. In spite of the notion that the model
supercedes the landscape itself through precession (Baudrillard's more
extreme cultural evaluation of precession), it turns out that we face not
the landscape's disappearance before its model, as much as its conceptual
reorganization philosophically under concepts inherent to technological
societies of the 21st century, where it becomes obvious that data is an
actuator of the landscape. Artists should be among the first to recognize
this and work with this shift.

[next installement: Fordable: The body and place in GIS practice]

[37] See Delanda, Manuel, One Thousand Years of Non-Linear History, Zone
Books, 611 Broadway Suite 608, NY NY, 1997, Sandstone and Granite, pg 57.
[38] http://www.confluence.org. "The goal of the project is to visit each
of the latitude and longitude integer degree intersections in the world,
and to take pictures at each location. The pictures and stories will then
be posted here." Accessed October 27th, 2002.
[39] My 1998 work net.art Sketch has some bearing on this thinking.
http://www.thing.net/~beestal/sketch/sketch.html
[40] I admit to a great desire to visit the only unvisited confluence in
the state of Nevada, USA, at 37N 116W. It is located less than 1000 meters
from a blast crater created by U.S. above ground nuclear testing.
http://www.confluence.org/confluence.php?lat7&lon=-116