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

http://www.c5corp.com

Fordable: The body and place in GIS practice [5/5]

The confluence of the body with place, (and their data), is the final
aspect of C5's research into landscape. Treating the body and its position
relative to a paradigmatic definition of place and its meaning provides a
much needed alternative practice, especially as Generation Flash [41]
marvelously rediscovers the brisling downtown area of the hypertextual
arts. Just as informatics change the nature of place, it changes the
nature of being in place, of moving through place, and of collaboration in
place. [42] These in turn inform the moribund theoretical associations of
'network' as physical communications infrastructures, tangles of packets
moving over them, communications/collaboration/commerce,
animation/browser/server. It instead provides a context (though GIS is
only one of many possible antidotes), to reveal abstract machineries to be
explored via a network theory in an expanded field, using the contemporary
tools of computation and network, but without being blockaded by an
analysis of the technical foundations and social manifestations of merely
one kind of network: the internet. The schema for exploring these issues
is, for C5, the implementation of relational systems in which the
landscape is allowed to have its say in any imaging (including nature
photography, drawing, painting), performance art (the body and the
landscape), land art (the modification of the landscape), and database art
(the management of geo data and processing), that emerge in collaboration
with all involved agents: artists/audience/parasite, as well as the land
itself. Who knows, maybe even some traditional net.art will emerge from
this activity.

There are unexplored spaces on the surface of the earth in the sense that
there are unexplored relations of landscape that can be revealed through
its data. Technical barriers, such as the politics of data collection and
acquisition, numerous, inscrutable [43] and/or inconsistent data formats,
and a lack of available software for processing the landscape outside of a
frame of assumptions [44] placed on GIS software by cartographers,
geologists, hydrologists, planners and oil companies, must be overcome for
artists to work with geo data in any other manner than as data
visualization, or ironically conceptual in the postmodern sense. New
terminologies for landscape (aesthetic and technical) are required to
expose the spaces between spaces that that may be occupied. C5 is not the
first art endeavor to build its own GIS codebases, and this is not at all
unrelated to the fact that the work that impresses us most with its
conceptual richness is that by artists who create much of their own
software [45], rather than to make use of packaged GIS solutions. We need
our own tools, designed with the endeavor of mining conceptual richness
from the materials of the Earth as the primary specification, not the
extraction of natural resources. To do so, we must select the manifolds
for our experiments from our observation of the landscape as artists, in
addition to the obvious: integrating the observations of science in art
works. Rather than place ourselves into the landscape by imposing on it,
we seek collaborative interactions with it in a manner mediated by its
data and its ontology.

Another technical issue is how to populate the manifold with appropriate
velocity vectors in order to create a portrait of the phase space that may
identify regions of attraction. To put it bluntly, we can't wait for
mountains to erode or explode so we can model relations in a dynamic
landscape. In order to twiddle the degrees of freedom in a modeled system
in order to predict, we have to have good initial observations of the
system in motion. But it is difficult to get dynamic models of the
landscape given geological time scales. (This is why earthquakes are hard
to predict, there is just not enough historical data to get the best
predictive model.) Most of the available data about the landscape is a
static temporal snapshot of the landscape. One common technique for
exploring such static data is to add arbitrary vectors to the manifold,
and then animate them under the constraints provided to them by the
initial data set, allowing analysis of inter-relations, and interpolation
of aspects of the system's phase portrait to be revealed through
interaction with related, or even speculative, vectors. (For example, you
can reveal past topographies in order to speculate about the differing
climatic dynamics of past landscapes through adding erosion models and
predictions about plate tectonics to the analysis.) For C5, the behavior
of the body in the landscape is an obvious vector for exploration in this
regard, both for reasons of art history, and because our collaborative
process as artists already involves meeting, training and performing
experiments in the outdoors.

This is the nature of informated eco-data-art that we have laid out for
ourselves. We suspect that along the way there will emerge aesthetic,
conceptual, algorithmic, and physical embodiments that will demonstrate an
alternative aesthetic practice for data Marco Polos, data Lewis and
Clarks, and data Micheal Heizers. Without doubt, there will also be data
George Mallorys, data Donner parties, and data Robert Smithsons. Both
glory and tragedy (often in simultaneity) are inherent aspects of
exploration. These are to be expected in a data frontier so vast and
relatively unexplored.

[41] Manovich, Lev, Generation Flash, 4/11/2002,
http://rhizome.org/object.rhiz?3426
[42] One aspect of C5's eco-challenge project is the study of
collaboration models in team dynamics, search and navigation.
http://www.c5corp.com/venues/ecochallenge/index.shtml
[43] Such as the SDTS standard, http://mcmcweb.er.usgs.gov/sdts/
[44] Much like the frame placed on 'digital photography' by Adobe
PhotoShop.
[45] For example, the GIS aspects Masaki Fujihata's Impressing Velocity,
http://www.c3.hu/~masaki/proposal/index.html,
http://www.zkm.de:81/~fujihata/iv99.html

Endnote:

This essay was not written, but rewritten many times. Valuable editorial
work was contributed by Geri Wittig, without whom I do not believe I could
call any of my texts writing. Also, commentary on various drafts from
Anne-Marie Schleiner and Joel Slayton were immensely helpful, as well
discussion with Lisa Jevbratt, Jack Toolin, and Carmin Karasic, on various
aspects of the sublime and precession. Thank you to Steve Durie for the
Memphis image, to Bruce Gardner for GPS tutorials and training, and Matt
Mays for forwarding many related URLs, all of which helped get these ideas
into place.