<br />RHIZOME DIGEST: March 03, 2006<br /><br />++ Always online at <a rel="nofollow" href="http://rhizome.org/digest">http://rhizome.org/digest</a> ++<br /><br />Content:<br /><br />+note+<br />1. Francis Hwang: Signing off<br /><br />+opportunity+<br />2. kristina maskarin: International competition for Cyber Arts 2006<br />3. Marisa Olson: opp: NY solo show (& Visa) for non-US artist<br />4. Don Sinclair: New Media and Performance Studies positions<br />5. Julian Bleecker: ACC Postdocs and Visiting Researcher Fellowship,<br />April 30 2006 Deadline<br /><br />+announcement+<br />6. Greg Smith: announcing vague terrain 02:digital landscape<br />7. Turbulence.org: urbulence Commission: "Peripheral n°2: KEYBOARD" by<br />Marika Dermineur<br /><br />+Commissioned by Rhizome.org+<br />8. Jonah Brucker-Cohen: Report from ARS@ARCO<br /><br />+thread+<br />9. Brett Stalbaum, Geert Dekkers, Myron Turner, curt cloninger, Myron<br />Turner, Rob Myers, Eric Dymond, Dirk Vekemans: An Interpretive Framework<br />for Contemporary Database Practice in the Arts<br /><br />+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +<br /><br />Rhizome is now offering Organizational Subscriptions, group memberships<br />that can be purchased at the institutional level. These subscriptions<br />allow participants at institutions to access Rhizome's services without<br />having to purchase individual memberships. For a discounted rate, students<br />or faculty at universities or visitors to art centers can have access to<br />Rhizome?s archives of art and text as well as guides and educational tools<br />to make navigation of this content easy. Rhizome is also offering<br />subsidized Organizational Subscriptions to qualifying institutions in poor<br />or excluded communities. Please visit <a rel="nofollow" href="http://rhizome.org/info/org.php">http://rhizome.org/info/org.php</a> for<br />more information or contact Lauren Cornell at LaurenCornell@Rhizome.org<br /><br />+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +<br /><br />1.<br /><br />From: Francis Hwang <francis@rhizome.org><br />Date: Mar 3, 2006<br />Subject: Signing off<br /><br />Hi everyone,<br /><br />Today is officially my last day at Rhizome, so I wanted to send out a<br />quick note and officially bid farewell. Actually, this isn't so much a<br />farewell, since I'll still be around, just as another member. The only<br />difference, really, will be that you will all have to put up with my<br />miscellaneous ramblings, without the benefit of me actually writing code<br />for you. ("Oh, great", I can hear some of you thinking.)<br /><br />Patrick May has been in the office since February, and the transition has<br />gone better than I could've hoped. He'll be in touch with y'all soon, but<br />let me just say that he's hit the ground running and already has a batch<br />of fresh new ideas to improve the user experience at Rhizome.<br /><br />Patrick, Lauren, and Marisa make a phenomenal team, and it's going to be a<br />kick to stand back and watch where they take Rhizome in the future. I'm<br />happy to be moving on, but I have to admit I will miss working with and<br />for the other folks on staff.<br /><br />I will also miss working with the Rhizome community, many of whom I've had<br />the privilege of getting to know well over the last three-and-a-half<br />years. I've enjoyed having so many people to learn from as the field has<br />continued to grow. And although some of our discussion about Rhizome<br />policy has been, mm, how you say, contentious, I always kept in mind that<br />it is mostly driven by the desire to see Rhizome, and the entire field of<br />new media arts, succeed. Without its opinionated users, Rhizome wouldn't<br />be what it is today, so thanks to all of you.<br /><br />As for my plans in the near future: Still unfixed, and right this minute I<br />suppose I like it that way. I'm actually going to be vacationing a bit<br />next month, with old friends to visit in Barcelona, a friend's wedding in<br />Minneapolis, and then quality time with my family in Washington State.<br />After that, who's to say? I'll be sure to keep y'all posted, in between<br />posting here about hallucinogenics and XML and everything in between.<br /><br />Thanks, everyone. And keep in touch,<br /><br />Francis Hwang<br />ex-Director of Technology<br />Rhizome.org<br /><br />+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +<br /><br />2.<br /><br />From: kristina maskarin <kristina_tina@yahoo.com><br />Date: Feb 26, 2006<br />Subject: International competition for Cyber Arts 2006<br /><br />Prix Ars Electronica - International competition for CyberArts 2006<br /><br />Submissions deadline March 17, 2006.<br /><br />Categories:<br />- Computeranimation / Visual Effects<br />- Digital Musics<br />- Interactive Art<br />- Net Vision<br />- Digital Communities<br />- [the next idea]<br /><br />Main website for online submitions & furtther details:<br /><a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.aec.at/en/index.asp">http://www.aec.at/en/index.asp</a><br /><br />+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +<br /><br />Support Rhizome: buy a hosting plan from BroadSpire<br /><br /><a rel="nofollow" href="http://rhizome.org/hosting/">http://rhizome.org/hosting/</a><br /><br />Reliable, robust hosting plans from $65 per year.<br /><br />Purchasing hosting from BroadSpire contributes directly to Rhizome's<br />fiscal well-being, so think about about the new Bundle pack, or any other<br />plan, today!<br /><br />About BroadSpire<br /><br />BroadSpire is a mid-size commercial web hosting provider. After conducting<br />a thorough review of the web hosting industry, we selected BroadSpire as<br />our partner because they offer the right combination of affordable plans<br />(prices start at $14.95 per month), dependable customer support, and a<br />full range of services. We have been working with BroadSpire since June<br />2002, and have been very impressed with the quality of their service.<br /><br />+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +<br /><br />3.<br /><br />From: Marisa Olson <marisa@rhizome.org><br />Date: Feb 27, 2006<br />Subject: opp: NY solo show (& Visa) for non-US artist<br /><br />From: Sixten Kai Nielsen <sixten@wooloo.org><br /><br />FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE<br /><br />Wooloo Productions and White Box present AsylumNYC: an opportunity for<br />non-US artists to exhibit and live in New York City. AsylumNYC will<br />provide a talented artist with both a solo show at a recognized New York<br />institution and the legal aid necessary to obtain an artists visa in the<br />United States of America.<br /><br />Location:<br />White Box<br />525 West 26th Street (between 10th and 11th Avenues)<br /> New York, New York 10001<br /><br />Date:<br />April 24, 2006, 8PM ? April 29, 2006<br /><br />All interested artists are encouraged to apply before April 1, 2006 at:<br />www.AsylumNYC.com<br />CREATIVE ASYLUM IN NEW YORK CITY<br />Based on the concept under exploration by Wooloo Productions in<br />AsylumHOME.net, which addresses the difficulties faced by asylum seekers<br />in Europe, AsylumNYC targets the challenge faced by artists interested in<br />working in the United States.<br /><br />After an online application process, White Box?s gallery space will become<br />a creative asylum where successful applicants will be invited to develop a<br />work/project from April 24 to April 29, 2006. Projects must actively<br />challenge a regime(s) of exclusion in New York by including otherwise<br />excluded individuals from cultural, economic or physical structures in the<br />City.<br /><br />Once an artist?s project is selected, AsylumNYC will provide a free lawyer<br />to try to obtain a O- artist visa. If successful, the artist will be<br />awarded the opportunity to stay in New York for three years.<br /><br />February 8, 2006 marks the launch of the www.AsylumNYC.com where<br />interested artists may apply until the April 1 deadline. To apply for<br />asylum, artists must be able to be present at White Box, 525 West 26th<br />Street (between 10th and 11th Avenues), New York, New York 10001 on April<br />24th, 2006 at 8 PM and STAY until 6:00pm on April 29th, 2006. While<br />staying at White Box, the artists will be provided with lodging and food,<br />but cannot leave the premises for the duration of the week.<br />ABOUT<br />Wooloo Productions is a provider of public and experimental spaces. Acting<br />on the level of facilitation, every Wooloo production aims to encourage<br />new forms of interaction and agency among members of diverse communities.<br /><br />AsylumNYC is produced and organized by Wooloo Productions<br />(<a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.wooloo.org">http://www.wooloo.org</a>) in close collaboration with White Box<br />(<a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.whiteboxny.org">http://www.whiteboxny.org</a>) and the Franklin Furnace Archive<br />(<a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.franklinfurnace.org">http://www.franklinfurnace.org</a>) in New York.<br /><br />For more information, please email Martin Rosengaard, Media Manager:<br />Martin@wooloo.org or call: +49 (0) 30 6676 3097<br /><br />Please visit <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.AsylumNYC.com">http://www.AsylumNYC.com</a> for all project details.<br /><br />+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +<br /><br />4.<br /><br />From: Don Sinclair <dws@yorku.ca><br />Date: Mar 1, 2006<br />Subject: New Media and Performance Studies positions<br /><br />Full Time Tenure Stream - Assistant Professor - New Media<br />Fine Arts Cultural Studies, Faculty of Fine Arts, York University<br />Toronto, Canada.<br /><br />Deadline: March 29, 2006<br />Start Date: July 1, 2006<br /><br />The Fine Arts Cultural Studies program, Faculty of Fine Arts, York<br />University invites applications for a tenure-track appointment at the<br />Assistant Professor level in New Media, to commence July 1, 2006. We seek<br />applicants who are engaged with new media arts and who are eager to teach<br />at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.<br /><br />The successful candidate will be a creative producer-researcher in new<br />media arts with a strong background in new media theory and/or cultural<br />studies. He/she will have a terminal degree, a PhD and/or an MFA.<br />Applicants must be suitable for prompt appointment to the graduate<br />Faculty. Candidates must demonstrate excellence in teaching as well as a<br />recognized record of accomplishments in their field. The candidate will<br />contribute to the expansion of the new media stream in the program and be<br />required to teach new media studio and studies courses.<br /><br />Full Time Tenure Stream - Assistant Professor - Performance Studies<br />Fine Arts Cultural Studies, Faculty of Fine Arts, York University<br />Toronto, Canada.<br /><br />Deadline: March 29, 2006<br />Start Date: July 1, 2006<br /><br />The Fine Arts Cultural Studies program, Faculty of Fine Arts, York<br />University invites applications for a tenure-track appointment at the<br />Assistant Professor level in Performance Studies, to commence July 1,<br />2006. The program seeks applicants who are engaged with performance in the<br />broadest sense and who are eager to teach at both the undergraduate and<br />graduate levels.<br /><br />Applicants will have the ability to contextualize performance as an<br />activity that transcends disciplines and to consider it in view of the<br />concerns of cultural studies. In addition, a strong background in the arts<br />and knowledge of the methodologies of interdisciplinarity are required for<br />appointment to this program.<br /><br />Applicants must have a PhD, a recognized record of research in performance<br />studies, and be able to demonstrate excellence in teaching. Experience<br />teaching large lecture classes as well as seminar courses will be an<br />asset. Applicants must be suitable for prompt appointment to the graduate<br />Faculty.<br /><br />The Fine Arts Cultural Studies Program (FACS) considers the fine,<br />performing and new media arts and offers a unique opportunity to explore<br />them from various interdisciplinary perspectives. Courses consider<br />relationships between the arts, the artistic forms which may emerge when<br />boundaries are blurred, and the place of the arts in both local and global<br />contexts. Within the Faculty of Fine Arts, FACS provides an integrated<br />approach to the study of the arts in culture through a balanced curriculum<br />of Western and non-Western content.<br /><br />York University is an Affirmative Action Employer. The Affirmative Action<br />Program can be found on York's website at<br /><a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.yorku.ca/acadjobs">http://www.yorku.ca/acadjobs</a> or a copy can be obtained by calling the<br />affirmative action office at 416-736-5713. All qualified candidates are<br />encouraged to apply; however, Canadian citizens and Permanent Residents<br />will be given priority.<br /><br />The deadline for receipt of application is March 29, 2006. All York<br />University positions are subject to budgetary approval. Qualified<br />applicants are invited to submit a letter identifying their research and<br />teaching interests and indicating how these might be compatible with the<br />Fine Arts Cultural Studies program, together with a curriculum vitae, a<br />one-page statement of teaching philosophy, and the names of three<br />referees, including addresses, phone numbers and email addresses, to:<br /><br />Fine Arts Cultural Studies, Attention Christine Gooljar, 283 Winters<br />College, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M3J<br />1P3. E-mail cgooljar@yorku.ca.<br /><br />+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +<br /><br />Rhizome ArtBase Exhibitions<br /><br /><a rel="nofollow" href="http://rhizome.org/art/exhibition/">http://rhizome.org/art/exhibition/</a><br /><br />Visit "Net Art's Cyborg[feminist]s, Punks, and Manifestos", an exhibition<br />on the politics of internet appearances, guest-curated by Marina Grzinic<br />from the Rhizome ArtBase.<br /><br /><a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.rhizome.org/art/exhibition/cyborg/">http://www.rhizome.org/art/exhibition/cyborg/</a><br /><br />+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +<br /><br />5.<br /><br />From: Julian Bleecker <julian@techkwondo.com><br />Date: Mar 2, 2006<br />Subject: ACC Postdocs and Visiting Researcher Fellowship, April 30 2006<br />Deadline<br /><br />Please post and distribute:<br /><br />The Annenberg Center for Communication (ACC) (www.annenberg.edu) at the<br />University of Southern California invites applications for up to eight<br />postdoctoral positions and one visiting scholar position. These Visiting<br />Research fellows will take part in a major multi-disciplinary research<br />initiative to explore the "The Meaning of the New Networked Age:<br />Innovation, Content, Society, and Policy." We welcome researchers from<br />various disciplines including anthropology, architecture, the arts,<br />business, communications, computer science, design, economics,<br />engineering, history, international relations, law, library science,<br />neurosciences, political science, rhetoric, and sociology.<br /><br />ACC is a research institute devoted to the study of new media from a<br />multi-disciplinary perspective. We are in a period of fundamental<br />transformation in the nature of the networks that connect people,<br />information, objects, and locations. But, what does it mean and what, if<br />anything, should be done to guide the process? The ACC research program<br />will explore the drivers of these changes, their meaning, and their<br />implications for business and government policy.<br /><br />The 2006-2007 theme investigates the structure and evolution of today's<br />political, social, cultural, technological, and knowledge networks. Topics<br />of interest include, but are not limited to:<br /><br />* How new technology is transforming politics and citizen engagement<br />worldwide,<br />* Communication law and policy<br />* New models of intellectual discourse and citation,<br />* Peer-to-peer cultural production and distribution,<br />* The emergence of pervasive mobile and wireless networks.<br /><br />The ACC intends to convene a multi-disciplinary cohort of scholars to<br />focus on a topic of pressing concern not well addressed in more<br />established disciplinary and departmental institutions. The visiting<br />fellows will work with the ACC's senior fellows and also will be expected<br />to pursue their research in residence at the Annenberg Center during the<br />2006-2007 academic year. They will collectively be responsible for<br />organizing one conference and a monthly speakers series, and to attend two<br />weekly Fellows' seminars of graduate, postdoctoral, and faculty fellows on<br />the theme of the meaning of the new networked age. They may not hold any<br />other appointment during the period of the fellowship.<br /><br />The postdoctoral fellowship is intended for scholars who have completed<br />their Ph.D since 2001, but we also will consider researchers with at least<br />four years of relevant, real- world experience. The ACC fellowship carries<br />a stipend of $45,000 in addition to a limited amount of funds to support<br />research and relocation expenses.<br /><br />The visiting scholar position is intended for a mid-career scholar with a<br />well -established track record and demonstrated leadership and expertise<br />related to the theme. The stipend will be commensurate with the scholar's<br />current position. ACC will also provide a limited amount of funds to<br />support research and relocation expenses.<br /><br />Applicants should clearly indicate whether they are applying for a<br />postdoctoral position or the visiting scholar position. Applications<br />should include a CV, a cover letter including a personal statement, and a<br />brief statement of research goals in relation to the theme. Three letters<br />of recommendation are to be sent directly by the writers (letters may also<br />be faxed to 213-747-4981). Address all application materials to Elizabeth<br />Harmon, Annenberg Center for Communication, University of Southern<br />California, 734 West Adams Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90089-7725. Email<br />contact: [eharmon at annenberg dot edu].<br /> The deadline for receipt in our office is April 30, 2006.<br /><br />+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +<br /><br />Rhizome.org 2005-2006 Net Art Commissions<br /><br />The Rhizome Commissioning Program makes financial support available to<br />artists for the creation of innovative new media art work via<br />panel-awarded commissions.<br /><br />For the 2005-2006 Rhizome Commissions, eleven artists/groups were selected<br />to create original works of net art.<br /><br /><a rel="nofollow" href="http://rhizome.org/commissions/">http://rhizome.org/commissions/</a><br /><br />The Rhizome Commissions Program is made possible by support from the<br />Jerome Foundation in celebration of the Jerome Hill Centennial, the<br />Greenwall Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and<br />the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. Additional support has<br />been provided by members of the Rhizome community.<br /><br />+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +<br /><br />6.<br /><br />From: Greg Smith <smith@serialconsign.com><br />Date: Mar 1, 2006<br />Subject: announcing vague terrain 02:digital landscape<br /><br />announcing vague terrain 02:digital landscape<br /><br />Vagueterrain.net the Toronto-based digital arts quarterly, has just<br />released its second issue: vague terrain 02: digital landscape. This<br />issue is dedicated to and exploration of the landscape as read, written,<br />and reconfigured by contemporary tools and discourse.<br /><br />This diverse body of work contains contributions across multiple mediums<br />by: akumu, andra mccartney, dominique pepin, frank lemire, gavin mcmurray,<br />greg smith, melanie kramer, michael sargent, nathan mcninch, neil wiernik,<br />nokami, patricia rodriguez, sans soleil, sarah mooney, tim hecker, and<br />tinkertoy.<br /><br />For more information please visit <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.vagueterrain.net">http://www.vagueterrain.net</a><br /><br />,g<br /><br />–<br />greg smith<br /><a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.serialconsign.com">http://www.serialconsign.com</a><br /><a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.vagueterrain.net">http://www.vagueterrain.net</a><br />416.877.4281<br />smith@serialconsign.com<br /><br />+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +<br /><br />7.<br /><br />From: Turbulence.org <turbulence@turbulence.org><br />Date: Mar 1, 2006<br />Subject: Turbulence Commission: "Peripheral n°2: KEYBOARD" by Marika<br />Dermineur<br /><br />March 1, 2006<br />Turbulence Commission: "Peripheral n°2: KEYBOARD" by Marika Dermineur with<br />Maud Palmaerts<br /><a rel="nofollow" href="http://turbulence.org/Works/keyboard/">http://turbulence.org/Works/keyboard/</a><br />Requires Flash Player 7, Speakers, and Fast Connection. Presented in<br />English and French<br /><br />"Peripheral n°2: KEYBOARD" reflects anew on the keyboard, this strange<br />object which we have beneath our eyes without really seeing it. It<br />explores writing and language and the articulation of the voice and hands;<br />and examines their importance for data processing and media classification<br />(images, texts, sounds). "KEYBOARD" is about automation, keyboards as<br />primitive interfaces, a tool that makes it possible for us to write,<br />capture, note, structure, communicate, index, research, etc.; and to<br />navigate into virtual spaces, in computer games for example, where the<br />four arrows are used to move and other keys are assigned to specific<br />actions. It is one of a series of works exploring material devices that<br />are connected to the computer of the Net-surfer.<br /><br />"Peripheral n°2: KEYBOARD" is a 2005 commission of New Radio and<br />Performing Arts, Inc. (aka Ether-Ore) for its Turbulence web site. It was<br />made possible with funding from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual<br />Arts.<br />"Peripheral n°2: KEYBOARD" was made during a residency at La Chambre<br />Blanche, Montreal, Canada.<br /><br />BIOGRAPHY<br /><br />Net artist, Marika Dermineur focuses on questions/issues/subjects related<br />to the network, the ability (for instance) of a program to produce<br />languages, images or sounds and to effect us. Graduated from la Sorbonne,<br />the Arts Décoratifs and the Arts et Métiers (Paris), she is a member of<br />the experimental web platform Incident.net; a teacher at the University of<br />Rennes 2. She has conducted workshops and lectures about newmedia. Her<br />installations and net art works, such as Keyboard, Googlehouse, The<br />Inhabitants (Impakt production), There! (V2 residence) have been presented<br />in numerous exhibitions and festivals: Videoformes 06, "Nuit Blanche" in<br />Roma and Paris 05, "Translation" (Basekamp Gallery, Philadelphia), File<br />festival 05 Sao Paulo, "Bis Repetita Placent" (Espace d'art Contemporain,<br />Ruart), "Download" and "Blackout" (exhibition, Paris); Vancouver's New<br />Forms Festival 2004, Ars Electronica, Instants Vidéo 04. She won first<br />prize fo net art in 2003 in Filmwinter (de), and has received funding from<br />Impakt Online (nl), Turbulence.org (us), La Chambre Blanche (ca), and<br />SCAM.<br /><br />For more information about Turbulence, please visit <a rel="nofollow" href="http://turbulence.org">http://turbulence.org</a><br /><br />Jo-Anne Green, Co-Director<br />New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc.: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://new-radio.org">http://new-radio.org</a><br />New York: 917.548.7780 ? Boston: 617.522.3856<br />Turbulence: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://turbulence.org">http://turbulence.org</a><br />New American Radio: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://somewhere.org">http://somewhere.org</a><br />Networked_Performance Blog: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://turbulence.org/blog">http://turbulence.org/blog</a><br />Upgrade! Boston: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://turbulence.org/upgrade">http://turbulence.org/upgrade</a><br /><br />+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +<br /><br />8.<br /><br />From: Jonah Brucker-Cohen <jonah@coin-operated.com><br />Date: Mar 3, 2006<br />Subject: Report from ARS@ARCO<br />+Commissioned by Rhizome.org+<br /><br />Report from ARS@ARCO<br />Madrid, Spain<br />Feb 8-9, 2006<br />by Jonah Brucker-Cohen (jonah_at_coin-operated.com)<br /><br />During a temperate February in Madrid, the 25th annual ARCO Art fair<br />descended on the Spanish Capital with close to 180,000 visitors, including<br />museum and art centre directors, gallery owners, and representatives of<br />international institutions. The work of over 2,000 artists was included in<br />the event. From artwork in booths at the convention center to those<br />scattered in galleries around the city, as well as many speaking<br />engagements, the fair was a massive homage to the art industry as both a<br />global business venture and a cultural phenomenon. This year's<br />specially-invited country was Austria, which brought along a wide array of<br />digital art projects curated by the Ars Electronica center in Linz.<br />Accompanying this exhibition was a symposium on the theme of the "Future<br />of Media Arts" with artists from Austria and other invited international<br />visitors, curators, and theorists.<br /><br />Located north west of downtown Madrid, the Conde Duque complex housed the<br />"Digital Transit" show featuring interactive projects in an exhibition<br />curated by the Ars Electronica Center. Included in the show were some<br />projects from the interactive art canon, such as Camille Utterback's "Text<br />Rain" and Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau's "Life Species II."<br />Other projects in the show included John Gerrard's "Watchful Portrait,"<br />two 3D portraits whose gazes follow the sun or moon through each day and<br />night, and in the bio-art domain was DNA-Consult's "GFPixel ? Portrait," a<br />painting of 4000 Petri-dishes filled with genetically transformed bacteria<br />that produce green light. Also in the show was Christian Moller's<br />"Cheese," a video installation of six young actresses attempting to hold a<br />"smile" for over an hour while video tracking measures the "sincerity" of<br />their smiles. An alarm sounded if their "happiness" fell below a certain<br />level. Most of the projects in the exhibition had strong visual<br />components, including Norbert Pfaffenbichler, Michael Aschauer and Lotte<br />Schreiber's "24!," a spatial audio-visual installation consisting of 24<br />pedestals in a grid formation with a projection of a black pixel on the<br />surface of each. The pixel's movement is based on a simple mathematical<br />structure giving it 24 possible movements to cover all corners of the<br />square, thus creating a cascade of sounds during these movements.<br />Examining public data sets was Ubermorgen.com's "Vote Auction," a website<br />that offered US citizens a chance to sell their presidential vote to<br />online bidders during the 2000 elections which resulted in several states<br />issuing temporary restraining orders for "illegal vote trading."<br /><br />Across the plaza from the Digital Transit show was the "Condition<br />PostMedia" show curated by Elisabeth Fiedler y Christa Steinle. This<br />exhibition featured projects attempting to bridge boundaries between<br />preconceived notions of media art and more traditional art forms. A<br />highlight of this exhibition was the "Shockbot Corejulio," by Austrian<br />artists Emanuel Andel and Christian Guetzer, which consisted of a computer<br />that ran a program instructing it to "shock" itself by lowering a metal<br />instrument on top of its exposed video card. The result was garbled video<br />output that attested to the frailties of modern technology and its<br />obedience to succumb to its own demise. This project also recently won an<br />award at the Transmediale 2005 festival in Berlin.<br /><br />North of the city, the Ars@ARCO symposium got underway at the ARCO fair.<br />The intent of the panelists was to give their vision of where Media Art<br />will be in the next five to ten years. Gerfried Stocker, director of Ars<br />Electronica and organizer of the panels and exhibitions began the day by<br />stating that the term "media art" is problematic because it harbors too<br />many definitions such as "cyber art," "digital art," "virtual art,"<br />"software art," "net.art," or "interactive art." The main focus seemed to<br />be that digital art had moved away from the gallery as the only way of<br />seeing the work and was now more integrated in arenas such as the Internet<br />and other "happenings" in public spaces. Heidi Grundmann opened the panels<br />with a presentation of her work in "Radio art."<br /><br />Focusing on media art in an international context, the second panel<br />featured artists, curators, and facilitators representing work from<br />Africa, Asia, South America, and India. Jose Carlos Mareitegui, from Peru,<br />spoke on how technology enables the "de-materialization" of information<br />that has created a new artistic space for artists who can update their<br />work on a continuous basis. Geetha Narayanan, director of the Srishti<br />School for Art and Technology in Bangalore, India spoke about how new<br />media art from post-materialistic societies will be different than those<br />from developing countries by shifting from "consumption" to "quality of<br />life" oriented approaches. Elaine Ng, director of Art Asia Pacific<br />Magazine, spoke on how Japan is not reflective of the greater art scene in<br />Asia and how Korea and Taiwan are beginning to follow the technological<br />lead of Japan. Focusing on the African continent, Marcus Neustatter,<br />curator and artist in the "Trinity Session" of Johannesburg, South Africa,<br />spoke about how future media artists are a mixture of everything from<br />entrepreneurs, to musicians, to filmmakers and how the distinction between<br />media artists and those trained technically is decreasing.<br /><br />The third panel featured artists and art historians working in various<br />media arts fields. I spoke about my work in deconstructing network<br />relationships and how the future of media arts relates to open systems and<br />reconfigurable rule-sets that change dynamically based on user<br />interaction. Beijing-based game artist Feng Meng Bo spoke about his work<br />in alternative gaming interfaces and his project "Q3," in which he<br />digitally inserted himself carrying a camcorder into the Quake 3 gaming<br />environment. Also on the panel was Dr.Katja Kwastek, an assistant<br />professor of Art History at the University of Munich, who spoke about<br />media arts from an historical perspective. Derrick De Kerkove, director of<br />the Marshall McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology, at the University<br />of Toronto, wrapped up the session saying that "More and more the consumer<br />has the capacity to modify, shift, and obtain ownership of art," and that<br />the "Art" is the act of this manipulation itself, where rules are broken<br />by consumers. In the larger sense, most, if not all, interactive media art<br />has rules associated with it and the future will see the audience redefine<br />and break those rules through their interaction. The resulting system will<br />then be integrated back into the work.<br /><br />As the ARS@ARCO event wound down, it was obvious that the future of media<br />arts remains a difficult subject to clearly articulate. From commercial<br />and private research centers to art labs releasing projects for the public<br />domain, to the independent artist working in their studio, the creators of<br />this type of art propagate from so many different outlets and outlooks.<br />With trends in the blog-o-sphere pointing at DIY aesthetics and "amateurs"<br />creating inventive hacks to existing consumer electronics products, the<br />idea of what "art" consists of, in this field, constantly needs<br />redefinition. The artists involved in the symposium came to the conclusion<br />that media art is not only about using a medium to express oneself, it is<br />also about questioning the very circumstances, time, place, and most<br />importantly, method and culture in which they are working.<br /><br />+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +<br /><br />9.<br /><br />From: Brett Stalbaum <stalbaum@ucsd.edu>, Geert Dekkers <geert@nznl.com>,<br />Myron Turner <myron_turner@shaw.ca>, curt cloninger <curt@lab404.com>,<br />Myron Turner <myron_turner@shaw.ca>, Rob Myers <rob@robmyers.org>, Eric<br />Dymond <dymond@idirect.ca>, Dirk Vekemans <dv@vilt.net><br />Date: Feb 24 - 28, 2006<br />Subject: An Interpretive Framework for Contemporary Database Practice in<br />the Arts<br /><br />+Brett Stalbaum posted:+<br /><br />An Interpretive Framework for Contemporary Database Practice in the Arts<br /><br />Introduction<br /><br />There are two common notions regarding the nature (or ontology) of data<br />and information that are important for us to think about when we are<br />considering artistic practice with database. The first is the notion that<br />information is disembodied from its subject, and the second is somewhat of<br />a conflation of the terms "data" and "information". Political concern<br />stemming from the first notion may be most responsible for stimulating<br />"database art", but current art practice with database can be broadly<br />divided into three generally recognizable, though not mutually exclusive<br />modes of practice: database politics, data visualization (the latter<br />related also to sonification, and haptics), and what I will term database<br />formalism. The second notion represents more of a noise in our at-large<br />cultural understanding regarding the meaning of the terms "data" and<br />"information" that when clarified, may sharpen the critical focus on an<br />aspect of data visualization practice. Honing these two notions will<br />provide us with a critical basis for the interpretation contemporary<br />database art practices, perhaps especially as they interact with emerging<br />geospatial and location aware media practices. In this writing,<br />interpretation is distinguished from definition and evaluation, as it is<br />in the tradition of analytic aesthetics. I write from the perspective of a<br />practicing artist; not a trained philosopher or art historian. Thus I<br />demur, at least somewhat, on the issue of defining database practice<br />(beyond the obvious), and I avoid any qualitative evaluation of the<br />examples I give. I only hope to chart the terrain of a contemporary<br />practice with which I am familiar, including the work of many colleagues<br />and collaborators. I hope to form an interpretation of the approaches<br />contemporary artists are taking to database that I hope will be useful in<br />evaluating this territory.<br /><br />Data Body and Data Politics<br /><br />I will start by considering works that emphasize the contemporary<br />consequences of disembodiment of data/information from its referent,<br />regardless of whether we are speaking about the human body and its<br />disembodied 'data body', or other material manifestations of reality and<br />the data which refers to it. "Information" and "data", in this narrow<br />context, are viewed as descriptions of the thing described, and are<br />somewhat conflated terms. (See next section.) Christiane Paul patently<br />describes the issues that seem to have been in play for artists<br />surrounding the issue of disembodiment:<br /><br />"In the digital age, the concept of 'disembodiment' does not only apply to<br />our physical body but also to notions of the object and materiality in<br />general. Information itself to a large extent seems to have lost its<br />'body', becoming an abstract 'quality' that can make a fluid transition<br />between different states of materiality. While the ultimate 'substance' of<br />information remains arguable, it is safe to say that data are not<br />necessarily attached to a specific form of manifestation. Information and<br />data sets are intrinsically virtual, that is, they exist as processes that<br />are not necessarily visible or graspable, such as the transferal or<br />transmission of data via networks."(174)<br /><br />I will argue that the case is subtly yet importantly different, as this<br />type of disembodiment is not actually a new phenomenon to the digital age.<br />Information/data have always been disembodied, and in fact we do see that<br />the interaction between the virtual with the real is more tightly bound<br />today, and indeed is more materially generative (yet contra-abstract),<br />than at anytime in history. Disembodiment is not the difference making<br />difference that the digital age brings. In order to demonstrate this, I<br />will take a double tact. First I will look into history for precedents of<br />disembodied data and information, hoping to show that "disembodiment" is<br />not a new issue just because we have entered a digital era. Then I will<br />try to show that it is not the disembodiment of the referrer from the<br />referent that creates the radial difference that the digital era has<br />brought, but rather that it is the nature of distributed, high speed data<br />processing that makes all the difference because it radically motorizes,<br />automates and makes ubiquitous the potential for data and information to<br />impinge on daily life. After presenting this idea, I will make reference<br />to a few database artworks that I think map to the various assumptions<br />outlined by Paul, which I think expresses an interpretive critical model<br />in which artistic practice can be specified in terms of 'database<br />politics'.<br /><br />It only requires a few examples from history to dispel the notion that<br />disembodiment is a novelty specific to the digital era. Edwin Hutchins, in<br />his study of how representations are propagated in systems of cultural<br />computation, points out that the use of bearing logs in sea navigation<br />dates back at least 4500 years, and that "Sumerian accountants developed<br />similar layouts for recording agricultural transactions as early as 2650<br />B.C." (124) Cuneiform Tablets, a clay tablet inscribed with ideograms and<br />numerals (multipliers), organized in the now familiar column and row<br />format, formed the material basis for the disembodiment of material<br />reality into a clay media for data storage of mundane business<br />transactions. And certainly, the notation on a tablet of "18 unproductive<br />trees" is no more the actual 18 unproductive trees than some contemporary<br />individual's poor credit history (a common example of a 'data body')<br />constitutes the breath of individual personhood. Yet, both such<br />representations are similarly disembodied data representations utilized<br />for economic control and management. In a loose sense cuneiform tablets<br />were the first spread sheets, and one could go further to argue that the<br />first written words and images instantiate a similar disembodiment of<br />referent and referrer, not to mention the disembodiment inherent in<br />language itself! This has been a constant issue in aesthetics from Plato<br />(mimesis) through semiotics (sign as combination of signifier/signified),<br />and in postmodern thought; perhaps most notoriously in the writings of<br />Jean Baudrillard where the sign becomes ascendant and begins itself to<br />relplace reality through precession.<br /><br />Similarly, data has for a long time exhibited the quality of being fluidly<br />transferable between forms of materiality in different representational<br />media, and in fact transferal and transmission of data via pre-industrial<br />'networks' show that data transferal is in no way a novel phenomenon or a<br />creation specifically of the digital age. Hutchins gives the chip log and<br />the methods of using it as just one example of the propagation and<br />transmission of representational states. The chip log is device consisting<br />of a reel, a rope line, and the "chip": a piece of wood that would be<br />thrown overboard to remain stationary in the water while knotted line was<br />let out. The passage of time would be marked by crew members singing a<br />hymn (maintaining the system's clock speed), and notations regarding the<br />number of knots unrolled would be recorded in a log at a regular fix<br />interval. The knots would measure the distance that the ship had traveled,<br />from which the term "knots" as a measurement unit for maritime speed is<br />derived. Importantly, Hutchins shows how the chip log was utilized to<br />perform an analog to digital conversion:<br /><br />"The log gave rise to a computational process that begins with<br />analog-to-digital conversion, which is followed by digital computation,<br />then either digital-to-analog conversion for interpretation or<br />digital-to-analog conversion followed by analog computation." (103)<br /><br />Through these conversions, the propagation of representations between<br />various crew members aboard ship was enabled. Chip logs were utilized as<br />dead reckoning instrumentation allowing the projection of the ship's<br />future position on nautical charts; nautical charts which are themselves<br />analog computers designed expressly for position-fixing calculations. Logs<br />and analog-to-digital conversions allowed data to be transported, often in<br />digital form, through a ship wide network of crew members utilizing<br />different media to perform their tasks; for example from the memory of the<br />log keeper into the log, then from the log to navigator who would project<br />the future position of the ship onto a chart at some fixed interval, and<br />then from the media of the chart to the mind of the captain who is<br />responsible for the larger journey.<br /><br />Data and information have qualities of their own, as calculable symbolic<br />representations capturing measurable aspects of material systems. Data and<br />information are not only disembodied in some material form of<br />representational abstraction from their subject (whether clay tablet or<br />digital electric impulses), but can be recorded and transferred from one<br />state to another, propagated from person-to-person in local, perhaps<br />totally linguistic, networks of social computation, or from place-to-place<br />via encoding into media mobilized by material transportation consisting of<br />technology such as sailing ships, or more recently, undersea fiber optic<br />cables. Importantly, this mobile property of data and information has been<br />at play in human culture long before the digital era - perhaps as long as<br />linguistic messages have been carried from place to place by foot and<br />shared among different groups, and certainly since written (doubly coded)<br />and numeric representations<br />began to be transported. Additionally, the example of cuneiform as a<br />particular clay media implementing informational disembodiment from the<br />material world emerged well before the development of the algebraic<br />analysis (as early as 1800 B.C.) and the discrete mathematics concepts<br />(congealing nicely in the figure of George Boole in the 19th century),<br />that would serve as the catalysts for the development of digital<br />communications and computational technologies during the 20th century. The<br />disembodiment of data and information from the real clearly predates the<br />digital era.<br /><br />Disembodiment does not mean that data and information, and their material<br />reality, do not influence one another. In fact the case is rather the<br />opposite, forming is the basis of the fundamentally materialist-formalist<br />analysis I am trying to forge here. As I have indicated in the past:<br /><br />"This position is supported by Paul Virilio?s theory of information as the<br />third dimension of matter, (energy being the second), in that information<br />and its effect on identity are not disembodied from the real, but rather<br />become a integral part of the real world projecting directly into the<br />body: a network of people hyperactivated by information machinery which<br />has joined with the body no more or less conspicuously than the pacemaker<br />or the telephone handset." (1998)<br /><br />The significant difference making difference that does arrive with the<br />digital era is the speed with which the relations between information<br />technology and material systems are implemented: the move from the speed<br />of hand inscribed clay tables, to ships, to trains, to telegraph, to the<br />speed of light on fiber optic and radio networks. (This trajectory roughly<br />paraphrases Virilio's analytic project.) The process has been a<br />teleological one; the move from writing data on clay storage devices and<br />the associated literacy to retrieve and utilize those notations in a local<br />economy has progressed to 'writing' data in informatic media such CPU's,<br />RAM, magnetic storage, optical and wireless networks, and of course this<br />too assumes an associated literacy, in the contemporary case one required<br />to utilize digital media in a global economy. As the transmission speed of<br />the media becomes faster, the ability of data and information to impinge<br />upon or embed itself in material systems itself expands. While clay-based<br />inscription systems improved the management of a local orchards in<br />Sumeria, information systems today, which wrap the Earth in fiber optic<br />cable and paint it with electromagnetic carrier waves, facilitate the<br />transmission of data and information around the world in milliseconds,<br />allowing a global scope of impact for data and information. For example,<br />as Geri Wittig points out regarding the relationship between geographic<br />information systems and the Earth as a complex system:<br /><br />"With the increasing use of GIS technologies in a wide variety of fields,<br />including art, the data networks generated will disseminate into the<br />expanding networks of information technology. I speculate these GIS<br />generated data networks have the potential to act as bifurcations and<br />coadaptive systems…" (2003)<br /><br />This means that systems which operate, transport and calculate at the<br />speed of light have greater power become co-operative in the distribution<br />and creation of the real, causing the disembodiment of data itself to<br />bifurcate into something more powerful and integrated with life on Earth<br />due to the speed and intensity of data flows. This allows data and<br />information to play a more immediate, acute, synchronized role in the<br />daily life of persons, as well as non-human ecosystems and flows of<br />materials. It is not disembodiment per se, but rather machinic catalysis<br />of the relations between virtual and real that is the difference making<br />difference in the digital era. Further it is the discrete properties of<br />the digital that enable this speed, as well as enabling the exact<br />quantification of information, ala Claude Shannon. It is the catalytic<br />properties inherent in the material basis of digital technology that<br />allows the analysis of the difference (that information is) to have a<br />radical transformational impact on every aspect of culture, society,<br />biota, climate, and to some degree, even geology. The disembodiment of<br />information from its referent, which is an archaic and fundamentally<br />ontological aspect of data and information, is now hyper-activated in real<br />time at the speed of light. And indeed, it is the consequences of this<br />speed which many artists working around the issues of 'database politics'<br />have responded to.<br /><br />A small but representative selection of artists who have notably responded<br />to the sudden imposition of database as a mediator of power and social<br />control include the Critical Art Ensemble, Natalie Jeremijenko, Graham<br />Harwood, and Diane Ludin. The Critical Art Ensemble were perhaps the first<br />artists to see the looming threat of database on matters of privacy and<br />power, and to present issues relating to database theoretically in terms<br />of an agent of social control. In their 1994 book The Electronic<br />Disturbance, CAE states:<br /><br />"As the electronic information-cores overflow with files of electronic<br />people (those transformed into credit histories, consumer types, patterns<br />and tendencies, etc.), electronic research, electronic money, and other<br />forms of information power, the nomad is free to wander the electronic<br />net, able to cross national boundaries with minimal resistance from<br />national bureaucracies. The privileged realm of electronic space controls<br />the physical logistics of manufacture, since the release of raw materials<br />requires electronic consent and direction." (CAE, 1994)<br /><br />While we do read here a direct reference to the concerns of disembodiment<br />in terms of "electronic people", we also see a clear focus on new forms of<br />pan-capitalist power and control over the economy through processes where<br />"electronic space controls the physical logistics of manufacture." This<br />inference on the part of CAE certainly maps to the notion of data and<br />information as disembodied control systems of management, but<br />disembodiment is placed in a context that makes the change less<br />attributable to the original sin of disembodiment than it is to the speed<br />and ease through which social power and control over the material world is<br />deployed via contemporary, digital, highly distributed database systems.<br />CAE's words may be the first shots fired in the art of database politics.<br /><br />Natalie Jeremijenko's and Graham Harwood's recent work with database share<br />a consistent theme: an attempt to address the asymmetry of power between<br />those who model and manipulate the world through data, (thus enjoying most<br />of the rights to benefit from information garnered from that data), and<br />those who are modeled and manipulated by data. A representative example of<br />Jeremijenko's recent work is the Bit Antiterror Line project, which allows<br />"every phone [home/cell/booth] to act as a networked microphone… For<br />collecting live audio data on civil liberty infringements and other<br />anti-terror events." The files are made available in a simple database of<br />audio files on the bit antiterror line web site (Jeremijenko), one of<br />which recounts the story of a stewardess who threatened a couple with<br />arrest by armed Air Marshal if they continued to draw silly pictures and<br />laugh at her. Harwood's 9 project is a website modeled around the simple<br />square shaped layout of 9 media elements. It allows people to represent<br />themselves, their neighborhoods, their identity, and their interests, via<br />media elements arranged in this simple, easy to use layout strategy,<br />including a notion of proximity and thus juxtaposition with neighboring<br />9's. The ease of use at the interface level belies a sophisticated custom<br />database under the covers, coded by the artist. 9 encourages not only self<br />representation, but the exploration of the self representations of others<br />in a shared data commons creating connections between/within communities<br />defined both geographically and informatically, while Jeremijenko's<br />project creates a data commons as both an emergency antidote to, and<br />cultural and social analysis of, the growing fascism apparent in the<br />United States as the "War on Terrorism" progresses. As I write this<br />(original draft, April 2004), CAE's Steve Kurtz is being investigated by a<br />grand jury in Buffalo, NY, essentially for daring to make provocative art<br />works with biological materials. Although he (and CAE) have presented this<br />work publicly in high profile art institutions for many years, his<br />research and materials stored in his home became the subject of a wasteful<br />and misguided anti-terror investigation after being noticed and reported<br />by first-responders following the tragic death of Hope Kurtz from natural<br />causes.<br /><br />The prevalence of database in biotechnology research has led to many<br />projects dealing with genomic data analysis or critique of the systems in<br />which nature becomes private property. Diane Ludin's "i-BPE, i-Biology<br />Patent Engine" takes on issues of intellectual property and ownership in<br />the high-tech era by setting up a context where real United States patents<br />on genes are themselves claimed as a kind of public property/context for<br />remixing and play with the language of patents, resulting in a "aggressive<br />take-over by i-BPE agents… i-BPE gene patents will return bio-rights to<br />non-governmental, cultural agents for revision." (Ludin) In a presently<br />unpublished manuscript, Ludin discusses, somewhat ironically, how speed<br />has (with its own certain irony), allowed the disembodiment of data from<br />its referent to return directly and literally to the site of our bodies,<br />for which the only prior art is billions of years of evolution. "With the<br />rise of ibiology the circuit between code and patent becomes part of the<br />super speed ecology of Bio Capitalism. Ibiology establishes the next level<br />of command and control culture where artificial selection becomes a<br />post-human, globalizing, gene profit system." (Ludin) In Ludin's, and<br />indeed all of the above examples, speed is the difference making<br />difference that the art of database politics ultimately must address<br />across a range of practice; regardless of whether the artist is using<br />database as media to help along the emergence of shared understanding<br />within a culturally mixed global culture, or responding defensively (with<br />database) to the onslaught of database driven assaults on civil rights<br />committed by corporatist or fascist governments.<br /><br />Data Visualization, Beautiful Information and Sublime Data<br /><br />A formal aspect of data and information that is often overlooked in<br />western culture at large is that the terms "data" and "information" have<br />meanings that are quite different from one another. Although Dictionaries<br />such as Webster's accurately define the terms; information as "an<br />informing or being informed; esp., a telling or being told of something",<br />and data as in "facts or figures to be processed; evidence, records,<br />statistics, etc. from which conclusions can be inferred; information",<br />(Webster's, italics mine), popular uses of the terms often overlap<br />somewhat more than their dictionary definitions allow. Note that<br />"information" is above embedded in the definition of data, across the<br />semi-colon boundary behind which "conclusions can be inferred", but<br />without a cadence or emphasis that would mark information's definitional<br />difference with the same clarity as it is most commonly defined in<br />computer science. Information as described above could easily be misread<br />as synonymous with "facts or figures to be processed", even given position<br />of the semi-colon. As I will discuss in the next paragraph, there is in<br />fact an issue of transitory states. Nevertheless, information is most<br />usefully defined as the conclusions or news of significant difference that<br />is inferred from the logical processing of a collection data. Data is<br />defined essentially as being raw facts; whereas information is mined from<br />processing those facts.<br /><br />Of course, the situation it is not that simple. At any one time the same<br />representations (I do not take "representation" to mean exclusively<br />"visual"), might exist in different terminal states (as either data or<br />information) on a larger conveyor belt of ubiquitous digital processing. A<br />simple example: it is common for the output of one program (nominally<br />"information") to be the input data for another, as in the unix command,<br />ps -ef | grep brett, which pipes the somewhat lengthy output of the ps<br />program (information about all processes) to the grep filter such that I<br />might know only of my processes; information can become data to be<br />filtered into more specific information. Another potential breakdown in<br />the distinction occurs due to the graphical user interface, which does a<br />better job of 'making invisible' the user's control data (another kind of<br />input), for example in the form of pointing as interactive input (mouse<br />clicks, mouse drags, etc.) These are definitely forms of control data<br />input, but they are processed more invisibly than control commands given<br />on a command line interface, because the visual half life of clicks and<br />drags as pixel residue on the screen is not buffered as are commands that<br />remain visible in the terminal shell (visible on screen) after being<br />issued in a CLI. Nevertheless, ignoring interactive input and its own<br />important implications, it is still true that data plays its most common<br />social 'role' in the form of input to programs, and it is information that<br />is derived from processing data as output; even if the<br />information is later transitioned by being reprocessed as input back into<br />some other program (potentially somewhere else in the world). The ontology<br />of data and information as input and output is contextually mediated and<br />transitory; existing alternatively between states of data and information.<br />Yet data is still associated in an important way with input and<br />information with output, even if the terms data and information are<br />treated more loosely in culture at large, perhaps due to being seen<br />adjacent to each other so often, a result of their status as quite<br />inseparable siblings or perhaps a digital yin/yang.<br /><br />A good question for the impatient reader at this point would be "What does<br />this have to do with contemporary database practice in art?" After all,<br />there is no shortage of clarification regarding the distinction between<br />"data" and "information" in engineering and the sciences. The answer is<br />that the conflation of terms seems to pool especially commonly in the<br />humanities discipline areas, such as art. To be fair, it is a common<br />linguistic conflation in culture at large and this is indeed where artists<br />operate, but I do think it merits our attention in any analysis of the<br />works of artists who are working with database, and particularly for<br />artists that are working specifically with data visualization, or the<br />related disciplines of data sonification and data haptics (as in ambient<br />computing).<br /><br />Lev Manovich has made a very important observation about the aesthetic<br />strategies of Data Visualization practice in an essay titled The<br />Anti-Sublime Ideal in Data Art, (2002), in which he critiques contemporary<br />data visualization practice in art as adhering to a pursuit of beauty in<br />the transformation (or processing) of large datasets into the visual<br />field: the "Anti-Sublime" aesthetic. Beauty is the pursuit of clarity,<br />balance and transparent form, and data visualization is often<br />pursued for the sake of understanding or making clear the behavior of data<br />and the systems represented by data. Beauty in data visualization is<br />opposed to the sublime: the condition under which the data overwhelms its<br />viewer, and the viewer's senses are mobilized in a special kind cognition<br />that allows them to carry on with the formation of an understanding that<br />is, as it turns out, more likely to be satisfactory than a random guess.<br />There are many names for this kind of cognition:<br />intuition, anticipation, instinct, or a sixth sense. The sublime is of<br />considerable interest to the artificial intelligence discipline in<br />computer science. Human intelligence seems able to deal with the sublime<br />condition and can continue to operate intelligently even when overwhelmed<br />or subjected to context shifts, while discrete computational<br />machines have not yet proven this ability. In a sense, the holy grail of<br />artificial intelligence is to create machines that can behave with human<br />like intelligence when similarly thrown by excessive amounts of data under<br />variable context.<br /><br />Interestingly, the definitions of the terms "beauty" and "sublime" have<br />also been culturally conflated, perhaps even more so, than the terms<br />"information" and "data". Just as information and data are sometimes<br />interchangeable terms in common usage, (often taken to mean information),<br />the meanings of beauty and sublime are today similarly conflated, (often<br />to mean beauty). The notion of beauty, revealing form and making<br />cognizable, as the goal of data visualization art works dealing with large<br />data sets is clearly described by Christiane Paul, writing of Benjamin<br />Fry's 1999 work "Valence":<br /><br />"The software visually represents individual pieces of information<br />according to their interactions with each other. Valence can be used for<br />visualizing almost anything, from the contents of a book to website<br />traffic, or for comparing different data sources. The resulting<br />visualization changes over time as it responds to new data. Instead of<br />providing statistical information … Valence provides a feel for general<br />trends and anomalies in the data by presenting a qualitative slice of the<br />information's structure. Valence functions as an aesthetic 'context<br />provider', setting up relationships between data elements that might not<br />be immediately obvious, and that exist beneath the surface of what we<br />usually perceive." (177, 178)<br /><br />I do not choose to wade into any aesthetic debate regarding the beautiful<br />and the sublime in data visualization; I am sticking to my promise to hold<br />fast to an interpretive framework in this writing. Lisa Jevbratt has<br />written an essay titled The Prospect of the Sublime in Data<br />Visualizations, responding in part to Manovich's use of the 1:1 project<br />(1999, 2002) as an example of the anti-sublime aesthetic. (Jevbratt) For<br />now, I merely want to point out that in terms of how we interpret the art<br />practices engaged in data visualization, beauty as opposed to the sublime<br />is the most critical contemporary interpretive framework in which such art<br />may be evaluated aesthetically. The criterion for analysis shifts from the<br />effectiveness of any particular visualization (and its ability to<br />facilitate an understanding of the data through<br />beauty), to the roll of the user or communities of users in interpreting a<br />visualization via their own ontological thrownness, their own conceptual,<br />computational or cultural methods for processing data, and their own<br />ability to perceive when facing conditions of sublimity. At its extremes,<br />the sublime analysis suggests that access to raw, unmediated data replace<br />visualizations, and that communities should take democratic control of<br />their own data interpretation in a way that best balances their exposure<br />to quantities of data against their need to reduce it to useful<br />information; all of which might only become practical if formal languages<br />for processing data become standard educational assumptions for a baseline<br />notion of what it means to be literate in post-industrial, high tech<br />societies. Microsoft Excel(TM) can not save us. Artists might be able to<br />play an important role in this regard: as guides in data exploration more<br />so than as experts in data visualization.<br /><br />Additionally, the formal definitions of data and information imply another<br />framework tightly coupled to the issues raised by the beautiful and the<br />sublime. Data visualization practice is certainly bound to the transition<br />of representations between states of being data and states of being<br />information; and as Manovich points out, most contemporary artists working<br />in data visualization are seemingly committed to visualization as<br />information. This is essentially congruent with Paul's discussion of Fry's<br />work Valence as well as her overall discussion of database practice;<br />further implying that much data visualization practice in the arts today<br />seemingly pursues beauty. Interpretively, we may extract from all of this<br />that the pursuit of information is the pursuit of the beautiful and that<br />the pursuit of data is the pursuit of the sublime. The former implies a<br />struggle for understanding, the later an impulse for exploration,<br />including the collection and generation of new data. How artists implement<br />their forms of expression between information and data, and possibly in<br />the transitory states between them, is an aesthetic issue that maps to the<br />transitory states between the sublime and the beautiful. Speaking<br />personally, this seems to be an unresolved area in data visualization as<br />artistic practice, as well as in the related formal practice that I<br />discuss in the next section.<br /><br />Virtual and Materialist Data Formalism, Data Mining<br /><br />In this section, my interpretive framework comes full circle back near the<br />issue of disembodiment. In the first section of this essay, I believe that<br />I was able to demonstrate that data and information have always been<br />disembodied from their referent, and I did so by arguing from a<br />materialist stance that views data as an important virtual reality that<br />actually impinges on material reality. In a previous text titled Database<br />Logic(s) and Landscape Art (original, 2002), I presented<br />a more radical, though consciously very speculative and provisional view<br />that data is embedded and operative within the actual through a process in<br />which humans/data/Earth are inextricably implicated: humans mediate the<br />landscape with the assistance of data about the landscape, and the data<br />itself mediates that mediation, not necessarily intentionally, but in such<br />a way that the actual material Earth now speaks through scientific data,<br />thereby expressing a voice in conversation with human culture. In the same<br />essay, I indicate how the term 'virtual' is also often misunderstood as<br />referring to the imaginary interfacial illusions that computational<br />systems can create, rather than (more appropriately) the abstract<br />mathematics of reality (that can be modeled computationally, well beyond 3<br />dimensions), that in some sense produces the actual. In other words, the<br />virtual is itself a real space of possible physical states for any system<br />that crystallize into the actual, which is precisely what allows<br />computational models of physical systems (such as engineering or<br />atmospheric simulations) to have predictive power. I made this case in<br />order to suggest that artists should utilize the notion of the virtual for<br />predictive or analytical practices that reveal knowledge about the world,<br />or better, that emerge<br />new behavior, exploration and experience. I think this holds for the<br />humanities. I am in no way concerned if what is revealed functions as<br />conceptual and performance art, and not as science.<br /><br />There are many database art projects that demonstrate this analytical and<br />productive practice which engage with data utilizing an ethos that<br />maintains an interest in the embodiment (contra disembodiment) that is<br />implied in the relationship between data and its material, actual, real<br />world referents. Although I have avoided definition, I would argue that<br />the preceding does constitute something close to a definition of database<br />art in the bigger picture, the relationship to materialist embodiment<br />being the key. In any case, it clearly fits into my interpretive framework<br />for contemporary database practice as database formalism. These projects<br />are interested in the actual materials that are modeled by data, and seek<br />new, exploratory methods of interacting with the material world that<br />reveal new knowledge about the materials, or the interactions with them,<br />and that allow data to become a cooperative co-participant in the<br />performance. For example, Lev Manovich's Soft Cinema (2001-) uses metadata<br />to dynamically organize a Mondrian inspired screen layout for videos shot<br />by the artist in his travels, in which "every clip is assigned 10<br />different parameters, which are both semantic and formal, so for example<br />one is geographical location… how much motion there is in a clip, which<br />is assigned a number… the contrast, the average brightness, the subject<br />matter…", and so forth. (Manovich, 2003) The parameters are utilized by<br />custom software to control the editing of the video clips and their<br />organization in the layout, allowing data about the (video) data (the<br />metadata) to manifest itself through being granted some level of decision<br />making authority and authorship. Manovich's cinema edits itself; revealing<br />itself in unexpected and often poetic ways that require one to apply a<br />thrown and sublime mode of paradigmatic viewership to its interpretation.<br /><br />David Rokeby's Giver of Names (1990-) and George Legrady's Pockets Full of<br />Memories (2001) both ask users to interact with real objects in the<br />gallery space, which are scanned and input into a database system for<br />further classification and comparison. While Rokeby's approach utilizes an<br />AI computer vision technique and artificial language processing, and<br />Legrady's uses a clustering algorithm designed to situate the personal<br />objects offered up by the audience with their statistically nearest<br />neighbors, both projects are literally concerned with the relation between<br />real objects and how they are thus mediated (either by naming them or<br />associating them with another) as they undergo analog-to-digital (material<br />to reference) conversion, insertion into a database, and subsequent data<br />analysis. Importantly, an emphasis on the materiality of the objects is<br />maintained in the exhibition space. The materiality is directly<br />experienced by the audiences who interact with Rokeby's collection of<br />objects lying around the exhibition space that they may situate on a<br />pedestal for scanning and interpretation by an artificial intelligence<br />system. In Legrady's case, a personal object if offered up for analysis.<br />Both systems connect rather literally with the real as an embodied space<br />to be contextualized.<br /><br />The near unification of referrer and referent is even more literal in<br />recent C5 work, (a group of which I am a member), where geographic<br />information system data (a digital 3D map of the landscape) is mined<br />through the preprocessing of the primary data into a layer of metadata<br />characterizing large areas of topography (currently the State of<br />California), that can be searched via a relational database and related<br />Java API. (The C5 Landscape Database API.) Mirroring the<br />Input/Processing/Output pattern common in classic, non-interactive data<br />processing, C5 takes input samples (collected with GPS), and processes<br />them to identify the most similar landscapes to the original, but that<br />exist somewhere else. As preparatory work for The Other Path (2004-) Geri<br />Wittig set out on a month long trek along the Great Wall of China,<br />starting in the northwest desert and following the Wall eastward to where<br />it runs to the edge of the Yellow Sea. GPS data was collected from twelve<br />separate trekked locations along the length of the Great Wall. Using<br />pattern-matching search procedures developed at C5 (Amul Goswamy and Brett<br />Stalbaum), the 12 most similar corresponding terrains in California were<br />identified. After determining the blocks representing the most similar<br />matching terrains in California, phase two of the Other Path search<br />process identified discrete paths within those terrains expressing similar<br />statistical characteristics, such as simple distance, cumulative distance,<br />and elevation change. To do this, a swarm of virtual hikers, implemented<br />as experimental features of the C5 Landscape Database API 2.0, were<br />unleashed in the virtual California landscape to explore and generate<br />tracklogs, which were then compared to Wittig's original "input" Great<br />Wall of China tracklogs. The results of this search identified the most<br />closely matching virtual tracklogs, which were then exported to tracklog<br />files, uploaded to GPS devices, and physically realized by C5 in a<br />performance of tertiary (after the original, after database) exploration<br />of what is now known as The Great Wall of California. In this performance,<br />walking works in the tradition of Richard Long, Hamish Fulton and perhaps<br />even Dominique Mazeaud are reconceived as input, processed by via database<br />applications that have been granted the ability to tell us where to go by<br />outputting GPS coordinates that we are conceptually bound to follow with<br />our feet. This generates alternative experience and exploration of the<br />landscape at a time when everything (on the landform surface of the Earth)<br />has already been explored and modeled. It emphasizes not the disembodiment<br />of datascapes from their referents, but their intimate connection and<br />productive capability.<br /><br />Conclusion<br /><br />I have outlined three modes of practice, database politics, data<br />visualization, and database formalism (the latter contra disembodiment) in<br />which contemporary database practice can be interpreted. The later<br />formalist tendency, in which database is conceived as virtual context for<br />implementing a data co-operative mediation of the world, perhaps most<br />interestingly overlaps in the final analysis with the database politics.<br />Though largely apolitical at first glance, the formalist interpretative<br />mode of database art practice is similar to that of database politics in<br />that the goal of both is to realign the power of database to distribute<br />the real, albeit for different reasons, as opposed to data visualization's<br />dominant (but perhaps not universal) desire to better understand data.<br />Though formalist practice may not self-consciously attempt to intercede in<br />pan-capitalist distribution of power, data formalism and artistic data<br />mining practices do conceive of agency returning back to the hands (or for<br />C5 the feet) of the people who interact with such systems, although<br />perhaps in a perverse way by tactically ceding a certain level of<br />arbitrary control to the database applications themselves. But as long<br />these are at least neutral with regards to power, and hopefully designed<br />and performed by autonomous users of the systems in non-coercive ways,<br />there are advantages to be found - perhaps even political ones.<br /><br />For one, formalist database practice is in alignment conceptually with the<br />ubiquity of database in our culture, perhaps encouraging individuals to<br />develop related expertise for apolitical ends (recreation, hobbies) that<br />produce ecologies of knowledge that become useful when political<br />conditions become too onerous for the majority of people. Formalist<br />practice could be aware that discovering the possibilities and building<br />novel alternatives (especially when done so by communities instead of for<br />them), might be just as effective as directly resisting the distributed,<br />nomadic power of systems of mass subjugation. Also, database formalism<br />allows aesthetic analysis to move toward and explore truly interesting,<br />purely formal issues of database itself as a medium. For example, the<br />relational database model trades maximum processing efficiency for the<br />ability to maintain ad hoc queries, which may be consequential in terms of<br />how the material world is ultimately mediated in particular instances. All<br />three of these conceptual modes of artistic practice with database are<br />important of course, and they certainly overlap in practice. None is<br />mutually exclusive.<br /><br />Interpretively, there is perhaps a fourth mode of practice that it may be<br />argued that I have ignored. The only other mode of database practice that<br />is perhaps not necessarily some derivation founded in database politics,<br />data visualization, or a database formalist practice is seemingly a<br />multimedia practice that assembles and processes a 'database' of<br />multimedia materials, mixing or remixing them into some other media forms<br />such as web video, animation, real time video processing, music, etc. The<br />multimedia assumption insists that the core of digital media art practice<br />is manifest as pixels on a screen, or some other output such as speakers,<br />or as interaction at an interface that produces some kind of visceral or<br />otherwise magically mediated experience. The mediation is viewed as<br />ultimately flowing from the identity of "the artist" of course, who is<br />assumed to produce some kind of political awareness or aesthetic/cultural<br />experience in the minds of the audience. Often, this kind of very<br />traditional orientation toward art practice does not consider the elements<br />in the database as data with their own ontology, and suppresses data's<br />identity into being mere media elements or samples to be processed,<br />remixed, and assembled by the artist in an expressive configuration of<br />individual artistic style and message. Media tools such as digital video<br />editing and multimedia authoring platforms are commonly employed, and<br />often these are used pretty much the way that their designers (large<br />corporations) intended them to be used. There is no reason to think that<br />such software applications can not be used in other ways (in fact, there<br />are many delightful examples on runme.org), but in practice such<br />conceptual repurposings are all too rare. When they do happen, they seem<br />to transcend multimedia and map to conceptual art practices (often termed<br />"software art"), and I suspect that my categorical distinctions regarding<br />database practices would support these. But I am veering dangerously<br />toward making an evaluation of multimedia practices here. That is not my<br />goal, so this is a good place to conclude.<br />References<br /><br /> 1. Critical Art Ensemble, The Electronic Disturbance, Autonomedia, New<br />York.<br /> 2. Jeremijenko, Natalie, Homepage for the bit antiterror line project<br /><a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.bureauit.org/antiterror/">http://www.bureauit.org/antiterror/</a>, accessed April 25th, 2K4.<br /> 3. Jevbratt, Lisa, The Prospect of the Sublime in Data Visualizations,<br />YLEM Journal, Artists using Science and Technology, Volume 24, Number<br />8, August 2K4.<br /> 4. Ludin, Diane, i-BPE project website<br /><a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.thing.net/~diane/i-BPE/index.html">http://www.thing.net/~diane/i-BPE/index.html</a>, accessed June 6th, 2K4.<br /> 5. Ludin, Diane, Deep Harmonization i-BPE, unpublished manuscript, 2K4.<br /> 6. Manovich, Lev The Anti-Sublime Ideal in Data Art, (2002)<br /><a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.manovich.net/DOCS/data_art.doc">http://www.manovich.net/DOCS/data_art.doc</a><br /> 7. Manovich, Lev, Lev Manovich / Interview at DEAF 2003, quoted from a<br />video<br /> 8. interview, selection transcribed by myself. Paul, Christiane,<br />Digital Art, © 2003, Thames and Hudson Ltd, London, ISBN<br />0-500-20376-9<br /> 9. Stalbaum, Brett, Aesthetic Conditions in Art on the Network: beyond<br />representation to the relative speeds of hypertextual and conceptual<br />implementations, Switch, the new media journal of the CADRE digital<br />laboratory, 1998, <a rel="nofollow" href="http://switch.sjsu.edu/web/v4n2/brett/">http://switch.sjsu.edu/web/v4n2/brett/</a><br /> 10. Stalbaum, Brett, Database Logic(s) and Landscape Art, Noemalab<br />-tecnologie & societa, 2003,<br /><a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.noemalab.org/sections/ideas/ideas_articles/stalbaum_landscape_art.html">http://www.noemalab.org/sections/ideas/ideas_articles/stalbaum_landscape_art.html</a><br /> 11. Webster's New World Dictionary and Thesuarus, Accent Software<br />International, Macmillian Publishers, Version 2.0 - 1998, Build #25<br /><br />(Original, 2004), first presented at the College Art Association 94th<br />annual conference, Boston MA, 2006<br />Panel - From Database and Place to Bio-Tech and Bots: Relationality versus<br />Autonomy in Media Art<br />Thursday, February 23 Chair: Marisa S. Olson, University of California,<br />Berkeley<br /><br />This essay is dedicated to the memory of Eric Gray, who is responsible<br />more than any other for helping me establish my interest in computing as a<br />young person. In 1981, Eric showed me a war dialer he had written in BASIC<br />on a TRS-80 computer, along with custom hardware enabling his tape drive<br />remote control output to perform pulse dialing on the plain old phone<br />network, which he was using (while his parents were away, of course) to<br />war dial for local modem connections to hack into. I was hooked. And the<br />hours of playing "Adventure" did not hurt either. On behalf of your family<br />and friends, we love and miss you Eric.<br /><br />Also, thanks to Warren Sack. I wrote this after presenting and hanging out<br />with him in Karlsrue in January 2004, talking about these kinds of things,<br />and it is really very cool that we both ended up presenting on Marisa's<br />panel together. Tad and Helen too:-)<br />+Geert Dekkers replied:+<br /><br />Thanks Brett — I read through your essay. First and foremost, I wish to<br />say that I really appreciate theory on this subject, especially now, as I<br />am doing a show along the theme of embodiment this September in Amsterdam,<br />including works by Mogens Jacobsen, Foofwa d"immobilite, Alan Sondheim,<br />myself and others.<br /><br />I realise though, that we differ somewhat in our consideration of (the<br />concept of the word) art. I'll try to articulate this in the following.<br /><br /><a rel="nofollow" href="http://nznl.com">http://nznl.com</a>, my own work, is evolving into a model of an imaginary<br />nznl.com exhibition hall, complete with its own "board of directors",<br />"nznl.com workers", "management culture", "history", etc. So it is to be a<br />"picture of a world", and is, as such, also what I think art should be.<br /><br />In the coming (as yet untitled) show, I'm trying to metaphorise the<br />passage between the virtual (which is, in the realm of nznl.com, to be<br />understood as the "idea" phrase of the work and the body (very literally,<br />the object in the gallery). For example, in Mogens Jacobsens work "I Hear<br />Denmark Singing" [<a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.artnode.org/art/">http://www.artnode.org/art/</a> jacobsen/art/pom2/] that I<br />hope to present, the potatoes producing the electricity represent the<br />passage or perhaps evolution of the idea phrase. Foofwa's BodyToy<br />[<a rel="nofollow" href="http://foofwa.com">http://foofwa.com</a>] (if I may so interpret it) traces the passage from our<br />understanding of our body (the "our" understood as a cultural whole – so<br />its "our collective body") to 3d rendering software through Foofwa's<br />rendering of this output in his presentation. Jan Robert Leegte's work<br />[http:// leegte.org] recreates the window and desktop metaphore in the<br />gallery, and in doing so, rebuilds the relationship with "real" space.<br />and "real" windows. And thus objectifies the metaphore, making it again<br />understandable for what it is.<br /><br />So I think I'm using the virtual world of data, or information in quite a<br />different way. I see very interesting concepts in your essay (perhaps I<br />should just call them "pictures") – the "datascape", or the "self<br />portrait as data", incidentally, just as I'm interested in the picture<br />that results from "paper trail". I'm not so much interested in the<br />difference between the data and information – I see data as "counting<br />events", I see information as a sentence, perhaps using data as a<br />quantifier of referers – this would be my "idea phrase" culminating in a<br />"paragraph" of meaning.<br /><br />I'm perhaps not so much interested in technology as I think you are. For<br />me, computer technology is a metaphore for a self-built world, built in<br />our collective image, with its known objects, and a language or languages<br />describing and/or creating these objects – a closed system in fact, where<br />the relationship with the "real" world "outside" is problematic to say the<br />least. While I found the GPS work recreating the Great Wall fascinating,<br />and the walks you guys made very conscientiously thought through, I don't<br />see how this work fits into a bigger "picture of the world". You can't<br />get away with saying something like "generates alternative experience and<br />exploration of the landscape at a time when everything (on the landform<br />surface of the Earth) has already been explored and modeled" (I personally<br />don't think this will ever happen, but that's beside the point) – I<br />actually think that this is a declaration after the fact, and not a<br />movitation and/or inspiration for the work. The works by Richard Long and<br />Hamish Fulton are in fact much closer to the simple art of walking<br />somewhere and telling us about it, and are therefore (imho) more revealing<br />on the subject of representation.<br /><br />To conclude somewhat hastily – I do think data and information are<br />important pieces of the puzzle, but I think that any good work of art<br />recreates a complete and full world, a reflection of our world, and in<br />doing so fundamentally grasps the interdependance between our bodies, our<br />language and culture. This is at least what I am trying to do.<br />+Brett Stalbaum replied:+<br /><br />Hi Geert, thanks. Is the "picture of a world", the "model", in this case<br />moving toward a performative simulation (a kind of theater) of the systems<br />you are picturing - i.e. do you have "actors" (directors for example) in<br />some from or forum playing out the various roles involved, or will it be<br />all software? A model of a system is a model of a system, (although<br />resolution and properties vary), and I think can be instantiated in many<br />forms - as a performance perhaps, or by allocating some memory to some<br />objects in a simulation, or an idea or proposal (these are real!), or a<br />hybrid combination… Or is your thinking evolving still?<br /><br />Thinking evolving still. But up till now, it is a collection of images and<br />other works, sometimes software (ie javascript, php etc). Produced daily,<br />published at exactly 00:00 AM each day. A piece at a time (so I might do a<br />plan of the plumbing one day, then the next a picture of the way the light<br />plays on a wall of the main hall, then a "still" of a board meeting, then<br />a javascript simulation of a leaky faucet the next). I'm not considering<br />the whole (there is no grand plan), and the whole thing might stlll veer<br />off in a different direction)<br /><br />[….] Kant associated the sublime with quantity and the beautiful with<br />quality. These are related to data and information respectively. So when<br />you say data is "counting events" and that information as a sentence<br />quantifying referers (which I take to mean, counting things in already<br />counted in order to understand it in a laconic form such as a "sentence"<br />digestible as a "idea phrase"), it leads me to suspect that you *are*<br />actually interested in the difference between data and information… and<br />that in fact we might agree here.<br /><br />Might this be incorporated in the Manovich piece I didn't read? I have<br />now read it – there's no reference to Kant though. I'd have to re-read<br />Kant's essays on the sublime to offer any critique.<br /><br />This bit from the Manovich piece Myron kindly sent me (The Anti-Sublime<br />Ideal in Data Art):<br /><br />One way to deal with this problem of motivation is to not to hide but to<br />foreground the arbitrary nature of the chosen mapping. Rather than try to<br />always being rational, data art can instead make the method out of<br />irrationality.11 This of course was the key strategy of the twentieth<br />century Surrealists. In the 1960s the late Surrealists ? the Situationists<br />? developed a number of methods for their ?the dérive? (the drift). The<br />goal of ?the dérive? was a kind of spatial ?ostranenie? (estrangement): to<br />let the city dweller experience the city in a new way and thus politicize<br />her or his perception of the habitat. One of these methods was to navigate<br />through Paris using a Map of London. This is the kind of poetry and<br />conceptual elegance I find missing from mapping projects in new media art.<br /><br />appeals to me – and I agree with Manovich – this is what I too, find<br />missing in most data works. The "idea phrase" of the work paraphrased<br />above is interesting in itself – humorous, catastrophically dadaistic. A<br />lot of data work I see is, well, so very seriously concerned with our<br />well-being.<br /><br />I should note that I'm trying to understand Hegel's Philosophy of Spirit<br />– through Philip J. Kain's "Hegel and the Other", all this part of a<br />lifelong reading of Lyotards "Le Differend". I have done some Kant, but<br />mostly, again, through Lyotard. His rendering of the sublime and the<br />beautiful has always left me mystifyed. Where I understand "the sublime"<br />more than I understand "the beautiful".<br /><br />> I'm perhaps not so much interested in technology as I think you are. <br />[….]<br /><br />I tried to make that clear, albeit by referencing the work of my colleague<br />Geri Wittig and her thoughts on coadaptation… see "Landscape data and<br />complex adaptive system Earth: Holism in complexity and network science"<br />(2003) <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.c5corp.com/research/complexsystem.shtml">http://www.c5corp.com/research/complexsystem.shtml</a><br /><br />> You can't get away with saying something like "generates [….]<br /><br />Another essay, to be published soon, actually covers more on this point…<br />dealing a lot with ideas from Robert Smithson. I don't know if you will<br />agree if I get away with it or not after reading it, we will see - (and I<br />love you either way:-) - but we will have to wait a bit for it to be<br />published.<br /><br />But one thing is must disagree with is the "declaration after the fact".<br />C5 works the other way - we meet in "field mediations" to present papers<br />to each other, then emerge work which entails us in the experience which<br />feeds back into new theory and new field mediations. "Database Logic(s)<br />and Landscape Art", (2002), "Landscape data and complex adaptive system<br />Earth: Holism in complexity and network science" (Wittig, 2003) and I<br />would argue "Ontology of Organization as System" (Slayton/Wittig, 1999),<br />and "Expansive Order Situated and Distributed Knowledge Production in<br />Network Space" (Wittig, 2000?), all contain key concepts that are part of<br />the Landscape Initiative projects that predate well predate the<br />projects…<br /><br />> The works by Richard Long and Hamish Fulton are in fact much closer to<br />the simple art of walking somewhere and telling us about it, and are<br />therefore (imho) more revealing on the subject of representation.<br /><br />I agree - these artists still hold onto the notion of control over the<br />subject - C5 is giving some (much) of this responsibility over to data in<br />collaboration. Ultimately, there will be an interface that allows anyone<br />to produce their own hikes and experiences… and to decide what the<br />subjectivity of those hikes means to them.<br /><br />This is, however, a very important difference. This part of current<br />artistic practice is so open – of course everyone may decide "what the<br />subjectivity of the hikes/dances/images/software experiences mean to<br />them". Art becomes a tool. But a hammer is not a painting.<br /><br />[….] I have (re)created (well, explored in a tertiary sense) no fuller<br />world than this very painful one:<br /><a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.paintersflat.net/rush_creek/index.html">http://www.paintersflat.net/rush_creek/index.html</a><br />+Brett Stalbaum added:+<br /><br />Manovich's intro to new media reader is very interesting… here is a<br />provocative snip that maps to the distinction you make between painting<br />and tool:<br /><br />"That is, not only have new media technologies?computer programming,<br />graphical human-computer interface, hypertext, computer multimedia,<br />networking (both wiredbased and wireless)?actualized the ideas behind<br />projects by artists, they have also extended them much further than the<br />artists originally imagined. As a result these technologies themselves<br />have become the greatest art works of today. The greatest hypertext is the<br />Web itself, because it is more complex, unpredictable and dynamic than any<br />novel that could have been written by a single human writer, even James<br />Joyce. The greatest interactive work is the interactive human-computer<br />interface itself: the fact that the user can easily change everything<br />which appears on her screen, in the process changing the internal state of<br />a computer or even commanding reality outside of it. The greatest<br />avant-garde film is software such as Final Cut Pro or After Effects which<br />contains the possibilities of combining together thousands of separate<br />tracks into a single movie, as well as setting various relationships<br />between all these different tracks?and it thus it develops the avant-garde<br />idea of a film as an abstract visual score to its logical end, and beyond.<br />Which means that those computer scientists who invented these<br />technologies?J. C. R. Licklider (05), Douglas Engelbart (08. 16), Ivan<br />Sutherland (09), Ted Nelson (11, 21, 30), Seymour Papert (28), Tim<br />Berners-Lee (54), and others?are the important artists of our time, maybe<br />the only artists who are truly important and who will be remembered from<br />this historical period."<br /><br /><a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.mrl.nyu.edu/~noah/nmr/book_samples/nmr-intro-manovich-excerpt.pdf">http://www.mrl.nyu.edu/~noah/nmr/book_samples/nmr-intro-manovich-excerpt.pdf</a><br /><br />Geert, which Hegel are your reading?<br /><br />Geert Dekkers wrote:<br />><br />> On 25-feb-2006, at 17:52, Brett Stalbaum wrote:<br />><br />>><br />>><br />>> Geert Dekkers wrote:<br />>><br /><br /><!– clip –><br /><br />>> I agree - these artists still hold onto the notion of control over<br />>> the subject - C5 is giving some (much) of this responsibility over to<br />>> data in collaboration. Ultimately, there will be an interface that<br />>> allows anyone to produce their own hikes and experiences… and to<br />>> decide what the subjectivity of those hikes means to them.<br />><br />><br />> This is, however, a very important difference. This part of current<br />> artistic practice is so open – of course everyone may decide "what the<br />> subjectivity of the hikes/dances/images/software experiences mean to<br />> them". Art becomes a tool. But a hammer is not a painting.<br />+Myron Turner replied:+<br /><br />I'm not sure if Geert had read Manovich's article on the sublime and data.<br /> Brett's essay sent me to it because I wanted to clarify for myself what<br />Manovich (and Brett) had in mind when they were talking about the sublime.<br /> Manivoch is contrasting Romantic aritsts, who aimed beyond the senses,<br />aimed at the sublime, to data artists who seek to create beauty by making<br />mapping data to a form that the senses can grasp. But he is concerned,<br />like Geert I belive, that such art leaves out the human dimension, leaves<br />out subjectivity. Manivoich concludes his essay with a personal plea<br />which is very affecting and worth repeating:<br /><br /> "For me, the real challenge of data art is not about how to map some <br />abstract and impersonal data into something meaningful and beautiful -<br />economists, graphic designers, and scientists are already doing this<br />quite well. The . . .more important challenge is how to represent the<br />personal subjective experience of a person living in a data society.. .<br />.How [can] new media. . . represent the ambiguity, the otherness, the<br />multi-dimensionality of our experience. . ? In short, rather than trying<br />hard to pursue the anti-sublime ideal, data visualization artists should<br />also not forget that art has the unique license to portray human<br />subjectivity."<br />+curt cloninger replied:+<br /><br />It's funny. I keep a running list of quotations here:<br /><a rel="nofollow" href="http://lab404.livejournal.com">http://lab404.livejournal.com</a><br /><br />So far Manovich has only made the list once:<br /><a rel="nofollow" href="http://lab404.livejournal.com/32638.html">http://lab404.livejournal.com/32638.html</a><br />[added 10/06/2004]<br /><br />A model for this "more excellent way" is Laney in William Gibson's novels<br />– water-witching the data to suss out and delineate the human intention<br />embedded within it. Sure there is an intrinsic relationship between<br />abstracted data and the real world, but just abstracting the data and<br />looking at it isn't going to reveal that relationship. The goal is to<br />somehow make the data resonant by transforming it into narrative, thus<br />mapping it back to the real in an experientially transformative way.<br /><br />But if you buy into Baudrillard, you're not looking for a "real/intrinsic"<br />connection back to the real, because the abstracted data has its own<br />simulated, relative, hyper- (I'd say quasi-) "truth." So you just<br />recontextualize the data a bit and claim you've created meaning. Such<br />work is still largely stuck on the disembodied data side of the fence –<br />along with the abstract control structures, materialist systems,<br />generative abstract visualizations (and of course, the 'puters themselves)<br />– which seems to me an increasingly dead-end side of the fence. I agree<br />that "data impinges on reality" in some generalized way (a la McLuhan or<br />Virilio), but that doesn't ensure that one's singular database artwork<br />will de facto impinge on reality. It's the artist's task to craft or<br />explore this connection with reality in some more intentional (dare I say<br />"idiosyncratic") way.<br /><br />Similarly, I agree with Brett's statement that, "artists should utilize<br />the notion of the virtual for predictive or analytical practices that<br />reveal knowledge about the world, or better, that emerge new behavior,<br />exploration and experience." But this isn't going to just automatically<br />happen simply because there exists some materialistic relationship between<br />the real world and abstracted data. The Rokeby and Legrady pieces<br />mentioned work because they start off with simple objects of immediate,<br />subjective knowability and relevance to the participants. Giver of Names<br />and Pockets Full of Memories work not because they successfully mediate<br />between the real/particular and the simulated/aggregate. On the contrary.<br /> They work precisely because they foreground the humorous limitations of<br />trying to abstract the real. It's not simply that stuff gets transfered<br />over the fence. It's that stuff gets transfered over the fence in a way<br />that tells a story about subjective human knowing!<br /> . Manovich's soft cinema is less interesting precisely because it lacks<br />this subjective element. Sure, the user provides subjective meaning by<br />making her own connections while passively viewing the generative piece,<br />but then the user also provides subjective meaning by making her own<br />connections while passively viewing Man With a Movie Camera (or Ace<br />Ventura, Pet Detective for that matter).<br /><br />I can't help but compare The Great Wall of California project to<br />Generative Psychogeography (<br /><a rel="nofollow" href="http://socialfiction.org/psychogeography/dummies.html">http://socialfiction.org/psychogeography/dummies.html</a> ). Both use<br />technology to navigate "real" space. The latter appeals to me because its<br />emphasis is less on the conceptual act of mapping and more on the<br />subjective human experience of drifiting around a city full of people. <br />Taking a map of Chicago and using it to negotiate Manhattan is going to<br />cause cognitive subjective growth in the drifter. Taking GPS coordinates<br />of China and using them to negotiate the California desert foregrounds a<br />coneptual observation regarding the ontology of data, but causes what kind<br />of subjective growth or awareness in the hiker? Last summer, after hiking<br />all day to a particularly amazing view in the middle of Slickrock<br />Wilderness here in western North Carolina, I came upon another group of<br />hikers at the top. As I watched the sun set, they computed the GPS<br />coordinates of their campsite in relatio!<br /> n to their current location and tried to get their cell phones to work,<br />occasionally pausing to snap a few digital pictures. It was all so much<br />extra, imported interference – obscuring rather than illuminating the<br />real. Not *concurrent with*, but *beneath* the paving stones lies the<br />beach.<br /><br />The "art" of database art is to take what you've gleaned from that<br />aggregated/abstracted realm and tie it back in to the soulish human realm<br />by storytelling (in the broadest sense of the word). Our data may<br />illuminate us, but they don't fully delimit or construct us. If you think<br />they do, you are liable to spend a lot of time on the semio-centric,<br />techno-wanking side of the fence.<br /><br />these seem related:<br /><a rel="nofollow" href="http://spurse.org/">http://spurse.org/</a><br /><a rel="nofollow" href="http://lab404.com/data/">http://lab404.com/data/</a><br /><a rel="nofollow" href="http://lab404.com/abstract/">http://lab404.com/abstract/</a><br /><a rel="nofollow" href="http://deepyoung.org/permanent/science/">http://deepyoung.org/permanent/science/</a><br />+Myron Turner replied:+<br /><br />As usual, Brett Stalbaum gives us a lot to think about in this essay.<br /><br />But I'm not sure I am convinced by his argument that speed is the<br />differentiating element in current information technology. As he points<br />out human beings have from earliest times sought to abstract data from the<br />material world, and the Sumerian accountant is a case in point–accounting<br />is historically one of the most important instances of data abstraction. <br />But the issue for the ancient Sumerian, if he had wanted for some reason<br />to communicate his data to others, was not speed alone. By showing his<br />tablets to his neighbor, he could very speedily communicate his data, just<br />as he very speedily could tell his neighbor what what on his mind by<br />talking face to face with him.<br /><br />The issue for the ancient Sumerian would be communicating his data and his<br />ideas to increasingly larger numbers of others. How would he deal with<br />this? He could gather interested parties into a large group and speak his<br />ideas to them. Or he could get on his horse and using its greater<br />capacity for speed go from farm to farm. In other words, I feel that the<br />issue isn't speed but numbers and space. His horse would enable him to<br />carry his data to one neighbor at a time over considerable distances (as<br />he understood them) at the speed of a horse. His convocation of<br />interested parties would enable him to communicate his ideas as widely as<br />his voice could carry. The problem of numbers is really a problem of<br />space. How much space can you cover in a given time.<br /><br />If we move ahead into the industrial era, we see that we've had speed for<br />a long time – the telegraph, the telephone. But they had the same limits<br />as the ancient Sumerian – limits in how much space could be traversed at<br />one time. These technologies could do it faster than the ancient<br />Sumerian's horse, but they were still largely face to face technolgies:<br /><br /> "Hello. That you, Jack? I have 30 bushels of corn. Have to run.<br />Still have to call Sam and Wayne. Bye."<br /><br />But we've had other technologies which have addressed in different ways<br />the issues of space, numbers and speed: printing, the phonograph,<br />photography, radio, tv–each of which could communicate to large numbers<br />of people with various degrees of speed. An interesting technology in<br />this context is the teletype which communicated the same data to large<br />numbers of people across a wide geography and as fast as the wires could<br />carry the words(and later the pictures).<br /><br />I really don't have answers as to what distinguishes digital culture from<br />earlier technogologies. It seems to me more than just differences of<br />degree–greater speed, greater numbers, more geography. My feeling is<br />that it has to do with networking and the nature of networks and how<br />networks have been organized.<br />+Rob Myers replied:+<br /><br />[….] As an aside, for Paul Virilio speed is the differentiating element in<br />contemporary society.<br /><br />[….] To take a non-database example, it was only possible to render<br />fragments of fractal sets by hand when they were first discovered. The<br />speed of computer calculation allowed the Mandlebrot set to be rendered<br />not just once but many times in less than a human lifetime. Speed here<br />makes what would otherwise be impossible (not exist) possible (exist).<br /><br />This speed has had a great impact not just on maths, but on science (the<br />genome project for example), and culture (synthesisers, samplers, and<br />computer graphics) in general.<br /><br />> I really don't have answers as to what distinguishes digital<br />> culture from earlier technogologies. It seems to me more than just<br />> differences of degree–greater speed, greater numbers, more<br />> geography. My feeling is that it has to do with networking and the<br />> nature of networks and how networks have been organized.<br /><br />Speed, perfect reproducibility, and the follies of Wired magazine. :-)<br />+Brett Stalbaum replied:+<br /><br />I sent this reply directly to Myron yesterday instead of to the list…<br />and already have a really thoughtful personal response… and he reminded<br />me to send it to the list as I had intended… thanks Myron. I also found<br />some info on Malakoff Diggins.<br /><a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.calgoldrush.com/travel/malakoff.html">http://www.calgoldrush.com/travel/malakoff.html</a><br />Hi Myron… I do think I do index linguistic networks that transport data<br />and information at foot speed… but did not very deeply treat automation<br />and speed. More below but two things here: I owe it to note debt to Paul<br />Virilio (good reading - and a better source to address questions than I,<br />and to point out that much communication now is human to machine or<br />machine… so neighbors don't always matter in the distribution of<br />material reality. (I'm not celebrating that… btw. That political issue<br />is the job of database politics to solve - my paper is a humble attempt at<br />interpreting a range of artistic practices that include database<br />politics…)<br /><br />> The issue for the ancient Sumerian would be communicating his data and<br />his ideas to increasingly larger numbers of others.<br />> How would he deal with this? He could gather interested parties into a<br />large group and speak his<br />ideas to them. Or he could<br />> get on his horse and using its greater capacity for speed go from farm<br />to farm.[….]<br /><br />He might not want to communicate confidential business data to large<br />number, but if he did, would he do so by going faster to reach those at<br />greater distances instead of having them come to him? (There is a well<br />known relationship between distance and speed…)<br /><br />> If we move ahead into the industrial era, we see that we've had speed<br />for a long time – the telegraph, the telephone.<br />> But they had the same limits as the ancient Sumerian – limits in how<br />much space could be traversed at one time. These technologies<br />> could do it faster than the ancient Sumerian's horse, but they were<br />still largely face to face technolgies:<br />><br />> "Hello. That you, Jack? I have 30 bushels of corn. Have to run.<br />Still have to call Sam and Wayne. Bye."<br />><br />> But we've had other technologies which have addressed in different ways<br />the issues of space, numbers and speed: printing,<br />> the phonograph, photography, radio, tv–each of which could communicate<br />to large numbers of people with various degrees of speed.<br />> An interesting technology in this context is the teletype which<br />communicated the same data to large numbers of people across a wide<br />> geography and as fast as the wires could carry the words(and later the<br />pictures).<br />><br /><br />So another difference making difference may be that that speed enables<br />greater ubiquity and more widespread use and thus greater numbers of<br />users? I'll sign up with you on that of course… But it occurs to me<br />that, although this is not a topic I treated, that the issue of who gets<br />to use these technologies during their initial and arguably most<br />culturally influential phases is at play. Who gets to use speed (or<br />Myron's quantity) and for what? Note that the CAE quote in the essay<br />implies something, to which I will add:<br /><br />One of the first phone lines in California was used to control the release<br />of water from damns in the Sierra Nevada to control flumes for very<br />destructive hydro mining practices, literally changing the landscape.<br />(Check out Malakov(sp?) Diggings State Park in California.) The<br />introduction of digital database systems begins in the the 1950's (roughly<br />contemporary with new random-access storage technologies - the earliest<br />disk drives…), and Lockheed and IBM developed the first large<br />hierarchical database system to support supply chain management for the<br />Apollo moon mission, and Oracle Corporation's first client was<br />Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. So even if quantity of users is the real<br />issue and not speed, (and I think the case that quantity is enabled by<br />speed is not really that hard to make, the telephone and books eventually<br />become ubiquitous right?), the impact of these increasingly fast (or<br />ubiquitous/quantious) technologies through who is in position to first<br />adopt them is interesting. Who it is that is in a hurry to be the first<br />users of "the difference" (whether the difference is speed or quantity or<br />lethality or marketability) that a new technology brings? In the essay I<br />deal with the *material and distributive* effects/possibilities of speed<br />and try to situate a broad range of<br />practice against it. I identify database politics as part of my<br />interpretive framework but don't do database politics here…<br /><br />> I really don't have answers as to what distinguishes digital culture<br />from earlier technogologies.<br /><br />I do actually address this, although laconically… when I mention Claude<br />Shannon. He showed that digital information could be measured in terms of<br />difference - and that you could measure it in automatic ways (semantically<br />neutral) that allowed data transmission to be better managed in digital<br />networks, which later allowed a high degree of automation, which in turn<br />led to greater speed! Interestingly he worked for the phone company; and<br />it should be no surprise that AT&T was very interested in the digital<br />transmission of data, and developed UNIX, which is a very early operating<br />system used in telephone switches. (And today lives on as<br />Linux/Mac/Solaris/etc…) So in fact, the digital does allow an increase<br />in speed through more effective control, even if across "the wire" the<br />electromagnetic carrier wave of older analog phone<br />systems, and the carrier waves carrying digital data, both travel at the<br />same speed of light. It is faster to control and manage digital switching<br />and data compression (because they are discrete) than it is analog data.<br />This is another reason that speed makes a difference in the digital.<br /><br />> It seems to me more than just<br />> differences of degree–greater speed, greater numbers, more geography.<br />> My feeling is that it has to do with networking and the<br />> nature of networks and how networks have been organized.<br /><br />I'd put networks right up there with disembodiment in that we have made<br />way too much of them… they are archaic too! Networks existed on sailing<br />ships as I pointed out, (including digital-to-analog and analog-to-digital<br />conversions!), but also in archaic economies long before digital<br />computation. Some archaic networks can be reconstructed… for example<br />much is known about prehistoric trade networks in western north America<br />from studying lithics - obsidian in particular. However, I agree, how a<br />network is designed is of course a formal influence on how it it used.<br />TCP/IP vs UDP (and their limits) can be thought of as formal foundations<br />of the net we know of as "inter", but it is a mistake to look at the<br />Internet as if if the mother of all networks, or the only network, or that<br />the net in Internet is the difference making difference. It is just very<br />fast and digital which in many ways closes distances faster. And the flow<br />and shape of the material world changes because of it - from where you get<br />to live to the freshness of your carrot juice. (I hasten to add, we can't<br />forget energy as the second dimension of matter as Virilio has it… which<br />interacts with information as the third…) But, there were archaic<br />networks of Egyptians that carried business records and messages around on<br />scrolls… it is important to understand the ontology of various networks<br />- but speed is the difference that makes the Internet…<br />+Eric Dymond replied:+<br /><br />I saw Virilio mentioned here, and thought this extract (from Micheal<br />Taormina's translation of The Accident of Art - Sylviere Lotringer/ Paul<br />Virilio) added something, and he is so very clear and easy to understand.<br /><br />SL<br />"The visual arts no longer speak to the eyes…<br /><br />PV<br />The situation I am describing is totally catastrophic, but I don't think<br />it's the end of the world if we recognize it.<br />If we don't, academicism has won. That is what academicism is, standards<br />that are connected to the pressure of special interests…<br /><br />SL<br />Today there is an entire area of art in which artists work on computers.<br /><br />PV<br />I have nothing against it.<br /><br />SL<br />They do visual art, but they know very well that they're using pixels as<br />a medium. Will this art be more legitimate in your eyes?<br /><br />PV<br />If they are able to penetrate the software. I'm not worried. If the<br />software is still the fruit of anonymous programmers dependent on big<br />corporations, I'm against it. I said as much to architects:so long as you<br />don't design your own software, you guys are losers.What do I expect of<br />architects? That they do not follow the example of Frank O. Gehry, using<br />Mirage 2000 software to design the Bilboa Opera. If architects today want<br />to prove themselves equal to the new technologies, like Paolo Uccello or<br />Piero de la Francesca, they would make the software themselves, they<br />would get back inside the machine. Whereas now they are sold the<br />equipment, and they work with it. That's what I can't accept. This<br />doesn't mean I am some Luddite eager to destroy machines, not at all. I<br />have always said: Penetrate the machine, explode it from the inside, <br />dismantle the system to appropriate it. here we come back to the<br />phenomena of appropriation."<br /><br />As well, how do the rules of normalization fit in? How does the language<br />Codd originally used traceroute to todays social/artistic incorporation of<br />database technology?<br />+Brett Stalbaum replied:+<br /><br />Thanks for transposing that Eric…<br /><br />Somewhat an aside, but one of the ugrad majors that I am the coordinator<br />for, (ICAM at UCSD, which was developed in the mid/late 1990's by<br />Manovich, Sheldon Brown, Adriene Jenik, Miller Puckette, Peter Otto and<br />others), has pretty much the same orientation toward artists and software<br />as Virilio. As most of you know, Puckette is certainly the most notorious<br />in this mode of practice where the artist (or in this case a classical<br />musician) is writing software tools that form the basis of new modalities<br />of arts practice, in addition to enabling their own work. So much of the<br />interdisciplinary rapprochement between music and visual arts has been<br />mediated by the software tools that Puckette innovated/evolved, (not to<br />mention their extensibility and the communities that grew up around those<br />platforms, of course…) I'd argue Max/msp over Final Cut Pro as among the<br />greatest art works of the 20th Century… Processing and the artists who<br />created it fit this mode too… (I talk about Ben Fry's work in the<br />essay…)<br /><br />Re ICAM, I'd add that we strongly advise that students in this major also<br />take a minor in CS. I'd add also that ICAM is not all tool making… many<br />students find that the CS background helps them develop more rigorously<br />integrative appraches to things as far flung as installtion, sculpture,<br />robotics, music, theater, computer games… you name it. (ICAMerals are a<br />diverse bunch - I am always impressed with and proud of the breadth of<br />work our students produce…)<br /><br />The description of the major and the requirements can be found here:<br /><a rel="nofollow" href="http://visarts.ucsd.edu/undergraduate/major/icam">http://visarts.ucsd.edu/undergraduate/major/icam</a><br />+Dirk Vekemans replied:+<br /><br />Hi Brett,<br /><br />It needn't concern you, but i have now gone through your essay a first<br />time. I'm very slow at these things but i already concluded it is much<br />more balanced than Manovich's latest work(that i feel has a very wrong<br />basis to it apart from being way to prescriptive in its self-promotion)<br />and anything but the horsething and quite receptible for further scrutiny<br />untsoweiter. It's a worthy effort, congratulations. I do see some serious<br />flaws, however, in your scheme of things.<br /><br />A very basic one, i think, is transcribing the speed of light of<br />transmission of data to the systems triggering the transmissions. That is<br />a very Virilian way (although i readily admit to not reading the guy i can<br />conclude as much from what i gather from second-hand versions- reading<br />Virilio is simply sth that didn't happen in my life yet, not sure if it<br />ever will) of transcoding a metaphorical perception of things to reality.<br />That's just basicly untrue. If things were truly happening at the speed of<br />light, i needn't bother writing anything anymore, because the connection<br />would be instant. ( see also<br /><a rel="nofollow" href="http://nkdee.blogspot.com/2005/12/fiction-absence.html">http://nkdee.blogspot.com/2005/12/fiction-absence.html</a>) I suspect this is<br />the very switch that allows him to run the cycles of his discours, and<br />although i see some nice things coming out of it by way of a positive<br />critique of overcoming what he deems to be a catastrophic state of affairs<br />( to that i would not agree either, -it's bad but only as bad as it gets,<br />any talk of catastrophy is easily undone by walking out the door and/or<br />having a chat with your neighbour or by pointing at the very real<br />catastrophies that crack through our imagined control over things), these<br />cycles also seem to be headed to an ideological, normative view on art,<br />like what is so obvious from the quote Eric sent in.<br /><br />Now i have been postponing a serious investigation of the line of thinking<br />Manovich is prescribing for lack of time to do it thoroughly, and here i<br />find you adding a more subtle variety to the strain, a higher quality<br />product, surely, allowing more openness and avoiding the normative. As<br />much as i welcome the soberness and quality of thought in it, it puts me<br />back<br />another step in my Laurence Sterne look alike attempt to explain what the<br />hell it is i'm talking about. Your essay points to a confusion of terms, i<br />see something similar in the confusion of ontology with epistemology, and<br />in the obiquitous use of the 'virtual' to avoid the ditches one might fall<br />into while taking the step. As much as i agree with discerning a flow from<br />the virtual towards the material, so rather an embodiment instead of an<br />disembodiment, i cannot agree with what it is in fact that is getting<br />'magically' materialised and certainly not with the catastrophic speed you<br />seem to ascribe to the process, leaving the artist with a very meagre<br />possibility as a fourth wheel on the database wagon. Relational databases<br />are very important in our business, but they needn't be the all explaining<br />base to how we deal with data. They are mere grids, results from (already)<br />an algorhytmic categorisation belonging to the upper end of episteme.<br />Taking them for the essence of things is an ontological move into the<br />fictional, spatialised representation of events, an arresting of energies<br />that is, in my book, ethically illegal. Basicly it's wishfull thinking,<br />the same wishfull thinking that inspires Wolfram to a similar ontological<br />move, doing away with time because he doesn't need it, using science as a<br />business-driven super scriptograph enscribing his fiction into reality.<br /><br />In that way, Virilio, or any other theory of catastrophy, is right in<br />assigning urgency to the matter at hand, because we are dealing with an<br />ontological disfiguration on a global scale. Time remains, however,<br />there's always time, because things only get as bad as they get.<br /><br />Again, there's nothing thorough here,only some hints at what i think could<br />be substantial objections. I'm hoping i 'll get there some other time<br />around.<br />+Brett Stalbaum replied:+<br /><br />I actually disagree with Virilio's thesis that speed necessarily leads to<br />catastrophe… a bigger more dangerous crash… because speed also allows<br />solutions. I am speculating here that speed leads to more frequent<br />catastrophe but also more frequent optimization/control and indeed some<br />crash avoidance. I'm glad for example that we can track bird flu, and<br />maybe this system of surveillance and control will be appreciated if the<br />virus does cross species or something catastrophic like that. But if it<br />does so, and it transmits between people as readily as it does birds, it<br />will be simply because that is what viruses do - and not due to the speed<br />of information technology. Yet if information tech does actually prevent<br />the catastrophe through surveillance and control - that would be an<br />example of IT mediating something very real (lives) and I would call that<br />a material difference. Information technology is in the material loop -<br />and of course IT itself (machinery of simulation) is very real. (I note,<br />bird flu is not now a catastrophe for anyone other than people who are<br />having their flocks culled and a few unfortunate individuals who have<br />contracted it…)<br /><br />So I don't think that I made the mistake - because I only use Virilio to<br />track the trajectory of speed through different faster technologies in a<br />teleological sense, in order to show that speed is the difference, which<br />helps me to point out that disembodiment is not. That is all I am doing<br />with Virilio… who I do very much enjoy reading. I should have been more<br />careful - some of his argument that I don't agree with rode into mine as a<br />parasite. Even though I did not talk about catastrophe.<br /><br />Now if you want to talk about politics and my country in particular - we<br />can talk about catastrophe! But it comes from hubris not database.<br /><br />> [….] Your essay points to a confusion of terms, i<br />> see something similar in the confusion of ontology with epistemology,<br /><br />yes!<br /><br />> and in<br />> the obiquitous use of the 'virtual' to avoid the ditches one might fall<br />into<br />> while taking the step. As much as i agree with discerning a flow from the<br />> virtual towards the material, so rather an embodiment instead of an<br />> disembodiment, i cannot agree with what it is in fact that is getting<br />> 'magically' materialised and certainly not with the catastrophic speed you<br />> seem to ascribe to the process, leaving the artist with a very meagre<br />> possibility as a fourth wheel on the database wagon.<br /><br />See above re my view on catastrophe, I don't adhere to that… but also,<br />as a materialist let me point out that I am very anti-magic. All kinds of<br />magic - including the notion that an artwork and by proxy the artist is a<br />strong social mediator between "an audience" and their beliefs, attitudes,<br />experience and political opinions. Especially when we are thinking about<br />the act of art making as exclusively representational, presentation layer,<br />image, output, interaction, interface, etc, which I relate<br />non-judgmentally to superficiality as in the surface representations<br />produced by computational machinery. (The presentation layer is<br />ontologically superficial, not epistemologically superficial.) I am<br />interested in a holistic analysis - the cycle between database->data<br />access->application logic->network->presentation<br />layer->user->world->sensor network/surveillance systems->back to database,<br />as a cycle. In other words, how computation, social and material worlds<br />now constantly mediate each other with information technology in a loop.<br />It is possible that artists are in a very meager situation relative to<br />what I have just said, but I don't (more honestly, probably can't) believe<br />it. (I think we share this.) I think if we focus our investigations on<br />reconfiguring the above cycles to make them do things that they were never<br />intended to do, that the role of the artist is very secure. If we use them<br />to make pictures and think that showing those to someone else will have<br />any kind of deep impact just because we are artists and artists should be<br />taken seriously due to our special social status… I worry about that!<br /><br />> Relational databases<br />> are very important in our business, but they needn't be the all explaining<br />> base to how we deal with data. They are mere grids, results from (already)<br />> an algorhytmic categorisation belonging to the upper end of episteme.<br />Taking<br />> them for the essence of things is an ontological move into the fictional,<br />> spatialised representation of events, an arresting of energies that is, in<br />> my book, ethically illegal. Basicly it's wishfull thinking, the same<br />> wishfull thinking that inspires Wolfram to a similar ontological move,<br />doing<br />> away with time because he doesn't need it, using science as a<br />> business-driven super scriptograph enscribing his fiction into reality.<br /><br />That is a valid critique - I am with you. I am also opposed to Baudrillard<br />in that I don't believe the sign surpasses or replaces the signified - I<br />agree that taking them for the essence of things is a mistake. I am also<br />anti-Platonist, as in, I believe that there there are no essences. Delanda<br />replaces essences with Deleuzian abstract machines… putting us right<br />back at exploring the relationships between the virtual and the actual and<br />their cooperative generation in a material sense. So I guess I am saying<br />that we take database very seriously as a mediator of the real, because<br />the virtual is closer to the real than fiction - in fact, the virtual and<br />the real are co-adaptive in C5's thinking. I don't care about fiction<br />actually, it is more interesting for me to take on the virtual/real axis<br />as something to contest (database politics) or something to work with and<br />explore (database formalism).<br />+curt cloninger replied:+<br /><br />This is where your position asserts a neutrality it doesn't seem to<br />actually occupy. Neither activism nor "database formalism" sidestep<br />fiction. Tactical media is a performative form of fiction, and "database<br />formalism" seems a philosophical form of fiction (more like an essay –<br />albeit with a kind of performative object lesson as its footnote). Even<br />"real science" is fiction, as David Wilson celebrates.<br /><br />The only thing not fictional is the ontological one to one relationship<br />that exists betwen the world and its hypothetical lifesize map. But as<br />soon as Borges observes and describes that abstract relationship, his<br />observational "research" becomes narrative (and a resonant narrative,<br />since Borges is a crafty writer). As soon as you write an artist<br />statement or a paper explaining the "meaning" of your GPS experiments,<br />your experiments become their own genre of fiction (particularly when your<br />para-art texts are written prior to the enacted experiments). The virtual<br />may in some sense be closer to the real than fiction (unless crafty<br />fiction is a lie that tells the truth), but your research itself is not<br />the "actual" virtual. It can't escape being a kind of obtuse fiction<br />about the virtual.<br />+Brett Stalbaum replied:+<br /><br />> Neutrality? I hope the work is not neutral… at least in terms of the<br />> kinds of emerging spaces we are seeking to explore or what the<br />> implications are.<br />><br />> [….]<br />> I don't know Wilson's work… but my best guess in terms of an issue<br />> that might be used to peel back the layers of this problem is<br />> autopoiesis… ie, real science reveals data and information about the<br />> real, a real which exists externally and removed from our (second and<br />> third order) autopoiesis (biological processes through which humans and<br />> societies produce and maintain our experience… which are more or less<br />> congruent with the outside, but not a representation, nor a fiction.)<br />><br />> But I don't know if we are on the same track here. Your thought about (I<br />> will substitute) database as a "performative form of fiction" is<br />> interesting (indeed, it is at least operational if not performative),<br />> but I think that (I may be wrong - don't want to put meanings in your<br />> text that are not there), substituting "fiction" for "simulation"<br />> ignores the generative (in a material sense) relationship that computer<br />> simulation can achieve (allowing predictive power through action on the<br />> possibilities revealed). Fiction seems something else to me… a very<br />> different way of producing possibilities, (no value judgment here…)<br />> perhaps because it is not bound to actual in the same way. Fiction and<br />> science are both rigorous in their application toward the real, but<br />> seemingly with very different methods. Do you disagree? The relation<br />> between them is certainly due more consideration… maybe you can<br />> speculate about how David Wilson might respond.<br />><br />> [….]<br />> You are correct that there is the virtual in a Deleuzian sense of<br />> abstract machines and that there is computational simulation of it.<br />> Simulation allows a new kind of interaction with those (a predictive<br />> one) that has revolutionized science (or maybe more accurately, speed it<br />> up… caused a phase shift.) We are interested in the spaces where these<br />> computational virtual realities come back to and impinge upon the real<br />> as a way of returning to the real, because simulation has such<br />> interesting material effects that are not new, but the scale they have<br />> achieved (participating in rearranging the surface of the Earth), is<br />> something considerable. I hold to that and suggest that there is a role<br />> for artists to play in exploring these spaces - which can unite<br />> data/information with communications, social processing, performance,<br />> the body, location, and ultimately re-representation. (I think I have<br />> just described my colleague Jack Toolin's project - which he led - "The<br />> Perfect View" - <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.c5corp.com/projects/perfectview/index.shtml">http://www.c5corp.com/projects/perfectview/index.shtml</a>)<br />><br />> If you want to equate fiction with simulation (or in our case simulation<br />> as "para-art text") and assume these have the same kinds of material<br />> effects, then I don't think anyone can argue with your position. But I<br />> don't believe that they can be easily equated. Curt you *almost* have me<br />> wanting to do some research in this area! (I'm so easy to bait;-) But,<br />> I'll freely admit that I don't care about parsing the issues relative to<br />> fiction quite as much as many other artists might… but I would<br />> certainly love to read the work.<br /><br />+Brett Stalbaum added:+<br />One more quick thing that I thought of when I was driving around doing<br />some errands… re the issue that Curt has identified. Jeremy Hight has a<br />text that I think is somehow related. Certainly, it is related to the<br />issue of space and narrative. A good read in any case.<br /><br />Narrative Archaeology, Xcp: Streetnotes: Summer 2003<br /><a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.xcp.bfn.org/hight.html">http://www.xcp.bfn.org/hight.html</a><br />+Dirk Vekemans replied:+<br /><br />There seems to have occured a slice in the fold of discussion here, which<br />is a bit of a pity because you two are circling some subjects that are<br />very important to me. I can't be sure if i'm not missing parts here, so i<br />can only guess and add somewhat generalising and sketchy as usual:<br /><br />- that Curt is stressing the importance of fiction correctly from my point<br />of view along with the bio-evolutionary link to autopoeisis that can't be<br />thought away from any concept of virtuality, not in the Deleuzian sense<br />anyway, because the Deleuzian virtual was carefully constructed along the<br />lines of his 'Bergsonism' in a quite succesful attempt to break free of<br />the Weismann germ-plasm reductionism (and subsequent reification of the<br />DNA) before it sort of entered its expansion, explosion into meaning in A<br />Thousand Plateaus ( i haven't gotten there yet in my Sternean quest, just<br />a few forward flashes into that book throwing me further backwards)<br /><br />- that however there's more to the fictional than narration (thanks<br />though, Brett for the link to Jeremy's work, i wasn't aware of it and it<br />looks very promising at first glimpse) fiction is both a strategy of<br />codification and one of liberation of the real, localising time in<br />language (or cinema, for that matter, soft or hard:-) ,linearising events<br />in recompilable code, enabling it to create interiors, become autonomous<br />and hence, paradoxically enabling it to become a force of<br />deterritorialisation. In that way i suspect fiction surpasses any Peircian<br />model of communication by interiorising the virtual, producing time while<br />killing it (cf. Thomas Berger's novel), perhaps Jeremy's work is along<br />that lines towards a supreme fiction, a perfect Wallace Stevens link to<br />the next point<br /><br />- that apart from the fictional one could also posit the poetical (i would<br />prefer lyrical to differentiate it strictly from biological autopoeisis,<br />at least for the time being) right in the midst here, where there is no<br />attempt present to localise time, but instead a more immediate link with<br />the real is mediated through algorhytmically working with resonances and<br />the platina inherent in the word itself. Here too any reference to<br />language may be substituted with equal intensities in the visual, although<br />from a cognitive point of view we're talking about a totally different<br />process, great painters can write and great poets can paint but not at the<br />same time unless perhaps they have acquired a Zen control of sorts and<br />calligraphy kinda entails that possibility. Here the affect would be to<br />spatialise time as opposed to localising it, but i won't go deeper here<br />into my private theories of recursive embodiment and energizing garbaging,<br />i suppose it sounds sufficiently convoluted as it is.<br /><br />- that i do notice, (this, Brett, in spite of some inspirations we<br />obviously share) that in dealing with databases people attempting to<br />theoretically incorporate the tremendous importance they have in a broader<br />perspective almost automatically transcode C5 habits to approaches of the<br />ontological, establishing levels of meaning, equating similar<br />constructions denoted with different terms, reducing the process of<br />reality to managable objects. I see you avoiding this and trying to escape<br />it, succeeding mostly, but not entirely getting rid of it. Well, i think<br />its rather funny anyway because it was Manovich himself who brought<br />attention to that process of transcoding in the Language of New Media, and<br />that now he seems to be missing the point that it takes time to query a<br />database and that therefore he needs to get real mighty quick to avoid<br />simulating the simulated. Still i admire him much.<br /><br />For what it's worth, i'd like to thank you both for your insights that are<br />very helpfull to me because they testify to a clarity of thinking that i<br />do not possess, with a quote from D.H. Lawrence's 'Poetry of the Present',<br />written in 1920, a tribute to life itself, and poetry of course:<br /><br />"The poetry of the beginning and the poetry of the end must have that<br />exquisite finality, perfection which belongs to all that is far off. It is<br />in the realm of all that is perfect. It is of the nature of all that is<br />complete and consummate. This completenes, this consummateness, the<br />finality and the perfection are conveyed in exquisite form: the perfect<br />symmetry, the rhythm which returns upon itself like a dance where the<br />hands link and loosen and link for the supreme moment of the end.<br />Perfected bygone moments, perfected moments in the glimmering futurity,<br />these are the treasured gem-like lyrics of Shelley and Keats.<br /><br />But there is another kind of poetry: the poetry of that which is at hand:<br />the immediate present. In the immediate present there is no perfection, no<br />consummation, nothing finished. The strands are all flying, quivering,<br />intermingling into the web, the waters are shaking the moon. There is no<br />round, consummate moon on the face of running water, nor on the face of<br />the unfinished tide. There are no gems of the living plasm. The living<br />plasm vibrates unspeakably, it inhales the future, it exhales the past, it<br />is the quick of both, and yet it is neither. There is no plasmic finality,<br />nothing crystal, permanent. If we try to fix the living tissue, as the<br />biologists fix it with formalin, we have only a hardened bit of the past,<br />the bygone life under observation. "<br />+Curt Cloninger replied:+<br /><br />>Neutrality? I hope the work is not neutral… at least in terms of<br />>the kinds of emerging spaces we are seeking to explore or what the<br />>implications are.<br /><br />I'm not saying the work itself is neutral (let's say "the work" here is<br />your Great Wall of California). It's too quirky to be neutral (that's a<br />compliment). You get brurises on your knees and you get fatigued and<br />possibly lost and disoriented. It's not like you're sending bots out to<br />scale the terrain, or projecting a 3D hollogram of one terrain onto<br />another (a la Lozanno-Hemmer). The virtual re-enters the real in the same<br />ways as a situationist applying a map of Chicago to a derive of New York<br />– it re-enters via subjective human experience.<br /><br />I'm saying your paper position claims an impossible neutrality/objectivity<br />given the nature of your topic (abstracted data). More below.<br /><br />>I don't know Wilson's work… [?.]<br /><br />We're definitely coming from two different cosmological perspectives here<br />(an extreme matereialist explanation of phenomena vs. a hybrid<br />materilist/spiritual explanation of phenomena), but I don't think my<br />perspective is as easily dismissed as you would like, because it is<br />germane to the assertions you want to make. Science "works" (atom bombs<br />blow stuff up), but your GPS experiments don't "work" in the same way. <br />You're not tweaking abstracted physics equations about matter and sending<br />them back to have some direct physical result on matter. You are tweaking<br />one of any number of devised, esoteric, man-constructed relationships (in<br />this instance, the relationship between land and abstracted/virtual data).<br /> I hope you'll allow this necessarily metaphysical assertion – without<br />humans to cognitively translate between the real and the virtual, there is<br />no virtual. The real tree never falls in the virtual forest, so to speak.<br /><br />So a dispassionate, quasi-scientific exploration of the relationship<br />between the real and the virtual from a purely materialist perspective –<br />dismissing Plato as irrelevant to your inquiry, senamtically dismissing<br />cognitive forms of human subjective knowing as second and third order<br />autopoesis – seems slippery, or at least fraught with contradictions you<br />haven't really addressed. Our biological processes are by no means<br />congruent with outside phenomena. They vary wildly from subjective<br />individual to subjective individual. This subjectivity is not something<br />to quarantine and ojbectively neutralized out of art. On the contrary,<br />such subjectivity is one of the things that makes art "mean" differently<br />than science "means." Your work intrinsically "knows" this, but you as<br />its spokesperson wants to play it down. I don't think the Great Wall of<br />California piece would have been as successful and interesting had you<br />used bots to collect the great wall coordinates and bots to "walk" the<br />coordinates out in California. Yet your position seems to claim that it<br />would have made little difference.<br /><br />>But I don't know if we are on the same track here. Your thought<br />>about (I will substitute) database as a "performative form of<br />>fiction" is interesting (indeed, it is at least operational if not<br />>performative), but I think that (I may be wrong - don't want to put<br />>meanings in your text that are not there), substituting "fiction"<br />>for "simulation" ignores the generative (in a material sense)<br />>relationship that computer simulation can achieve (allowing<br />>predictive power through action on the possibilities revealed).<br />>Fiction seems something else to me… a very different way of<br />>producing possibilities, (no value judgment here…) perhaps because<br />>it is not bound to actual in the same way.<br /><br />You're missing an important distinction I'm trying to foreground.<br />"Database" itself is not a performative form of fiction. Nor is "the<br />virtual" a form of fiction in and of itself (although it's getting<br />closer). "Tactical media art uses of database" are a performative form of<br />fiction. And even your "formalist database art" is a performative form of<br />fiction. You seem to want "simulation" to mean "the abstracted virtual." <br />But "simulation" (verb) is not "simulacra" (noun). Simulation is a<br />performative action. And, as database interface art foregrounds, this<br />performative act of abstraction can be mapped into the virtual by any<br />number of subjective means. As tactical/political database art<br />foregrounds, the virtual can then be recontextualized and mappend back<br />into the real by any number of subjective means.<br /><br />But to claim that "database formalism" is exploring a pure, material,<br />ontological relationship between the real/virtual is a dicey claim. Your<br />inquiry into simuation requires you to practice simulation, making<br />subjective choices that are by definition performative (and thus fictive)<br />choices. Call it a Heisenberg principle of abstraction. To recognize and<br />foreground an abstract relationship is to subjectivise it. There are an<br />infinite number of potential relationships "pre-existing" in the cosmos<br />between things and their potential abstractions, but once you recognize<br />one of those relationships (land vis map, for example), and you begin<br />exploring the back and forth of it, you simulate/enact/make real that<br />relationship, necessarily bringing yourself into the equation and altering<br />the "purity" of the (no longer) potential abstraction. It's one of those<br />hermeneutical catch 22s of deconstruction.<br /><br />>Fiction and science are both rigorous in their application toward<br />>the real, but seemingly with very different methods. Do you<br />>disagree? The relation between them is certainly due more<br />>consideration… maybe you can speculate about how David Wilson<br />>might respond.<br /><br />I agree. And I'm saying the Great Wall of California is more fiction than<br />science. And I'm saying science is a kind of fiction (much moreso than<br />fiction is a kind of science). I wouldn't presume to fathom the mind of<br />David Wilson ( <a rel="nofollow" href="http://mjt.org">http://mjt.org</a> ). I just bought the t-shirt.<br />>We are interested in the spaces where these computational virtual<br />>realities come back to and impinge upon the real as a way of<br />>returning to the real, because simulation has such interesting<br />>material effects that are not new, but the scale they have achieved<br />>(participating in rearranging the surface of the Earth), is<br />>something considerable. I hold to that and suggest that there is a<br />>role for artists to play in exploring these spaces - which can unite<br />>data/information with communications, social processing,<br />>performance, the body, location, and ultimately re-representation.<br /><br />I agree. And I don't see anything inherently materialist about database<br />art that disqualifies it from benefiting from the contribution of the<br />"aesthetic" artist. In several ways, databases seem to invite such a<br />contribution. But that's another topic.<br /><br />>If you want to equate fiction with simulation (or in our case<br />>simulation as "para-art text") and assume these have the same kinds<br />>of material effects, then I don't think anyone can argue with your<br />>position. But I don't believe that they can be easily equated.<br /><br />Again, I'm asserting that simulation is by its very nature a performative<br />act intrinsically dependent on subjective human cognition for its encoding<br />and decoding (or abstraction/reification, or whatever you want to call<br />it). Thus it is a kind of fiction.<br /><br />>Curt you *almost* have me wanting to do some research in this area!<br />>(I'm so easy to bait;-) But, I'll freely admit that I don't care<br />>about parsing the issues relative to fiction quite as much as many<br />>other artists might… but I would certainly love to read the work.<br /><br />An (appropriately) idiosyncratic start might be –<br /><br />FIction:<br />Baudolino. Umberto Eco.<br />The Third Policeman. Flann O'Brien.<br />Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. Haruki Murakami.<br />Faust. Jan Svankmajer.<br />"Del Rigor en la Ciencia" (On Exactitude in Science). Jorge LuisBorges.<br />Madcap Laughs. Syd Barrett.<br />A Child's Garden of Verses. Robert Louis Stevenson. (<br /><a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/stevenson/collections/childs_garden_of_verses.html">http://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/stevenson/collections/childs_garden_of_verses.html</a><br />)<br /><br />Non-fiction:<br />Mysticism. Evelyn Underhill. (<br /><a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.ccel.org/u/underhill/mysticism/mysticism1.0.html">http://www.ccel.org/u/underhill/mysticism/mysticism1.0.html</a> )<br />Orthodoxy. GK Chesterton. (<br /><a rel="nofollow" href="http://pagebypagebooks.com/Gilbert_K_Chesterton/Orthodoxy/">http://pagebypagebooks.com/Gilbert_K_Chesterton/Orthodoxy/</a> ,<br />particularly the section entitled "The Ethics of Elfland").<br />The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Oliver Sacks.<br />Lipstick Traces on a Cigarette. Greil Marcus.<br /><br />+curt cloninger added:+<br /><br />c:<br />>You are tweaking one of any number of devised, esoteric,<br />>man-constructed relationships (in this instance, the relationship<br />>between land and abstracted/virtual data).<br /><br />b:<br />>Also though, we include the social and individual in that<br />>relationship between land and abstracted data… although the<br />>individually meaningful resources have hardly been released. My hope<br />>is that soon you will be able to go to a website and produce virtual<br />>hikes to follow and so forth. Right now, the closest thing is<br />>probably any uses to which you might put the 1.0.3 version of the<br />>API (which is public, GNU), or anyone can download the tracklogs for<br />>the Rush Creek Wilderness Trail and go.<br /><br />c:<br />This open source aspect of the project (research project as art-making<br />meta-tool) at least allows for a subjective element to be injected by<br />other artists/users/participants later down the line. And perhaps if you<br />had enforced your own more overt subjective narrative from the beginning,<br />your bias would have been embedded into your tool/approach, and would have<br />limited variable uses later on. Yes, that seems a fair point.<br /><br />c:<br />>I hope you'll allow this necessarily metaphysical assertion –<br />>without humans to cognitively translate between the real and the<br />>virtual, there is no virtual. The real tree never falls in the<br />>virtual forest, so to speak.<br /><br />b:<br />>Possibly no. Delanda (rereader of Deleuze who makes a good case to<br />>recapture Deleuze for the analytic side of the<br />>continental/analytical split), makes a case for abstract machines<br />>replacing essences. Every system has manifold possibilities (and<br />>some impossibilities), but crystallizes or slips into an actual<br />>state. The actual state is what we tend to call real, but the other<br />>possibilities for any system are a kind of reality too… and for<br />>Delanda and Deleuze, these too have qualities and tendencies that<br />>are important to note. In fact, contemporary computational<br />>techniques allow their simulation and exploration of real spaces<br />>that are not yet actual, but which might become. To ref your nuclear<br />>example - the US no longer tests actual atom bombs - but does them<br />>in simulation. We can know how a new design will function without<br />>shaking up the state of Nevada… So I guess our point is that in so<br />>many ways these predictive technologies now play a role in producing<br />>both the social and the real material world. (Using software to<br />>determine if a dam will work there, how fast it will silt up, etc<br />>plays a role in the decision making about what actually happens…<br />>and the virtual allows the landscape to enter into the social<br />>conversation…)<br /><br />c:<br />You seem to be implying that the connection between simulated nuclear<br />tests and the real world is the same (or negligably different) than the<br />connection between simuated social art projects and the real world. I'm<br />saying there is a great difference. Just as physics isn't sociology,<br />simulating the physical world doesn't work the same way as simulating the<br />social world (although a materialist might have reason to hope, in x<br />number of years, given Moore's law, etc.). Yes, you can run predictive<br />virtual analysis on both physics and society; but encoding, simulating,<br />analyzing, and reifying the social world is a whole lot more subjective<br />and sloppy than encoding, simulating, analyzing, and reifying the world of<br />quantum physics. Virtual environments have helped physicists make better<br />bombs, but they haven't helped us solve our social problems. It's a<br />garbage in / garbage out conundrum. How do you quantify, abstract, and<br />binarily encode the wonder that is human society? Good luck (especially<br />without the input of the subjective/aesthetic artist).<br /><br />This quote from Chesterton seems particularly applilcable:<br /><br />+++++++++++<br /><br />Here is the peculiar perfection of tone and truth in the nursery tales.<br />The man of science says, "Cut the stalk, and the apple will fall"; but he<br />says it calmly, as if the one idea really led up to the other. The witch<br />in the fairy tale says, "Blow the horn, and the ogre's castle will fall";<br />but she does not say it as if it were something in which the effect<br />obviously arose out of the cause. Doubtless she has given the advice to<br />many champions, and has seen many castles fall, but she does not lose<br />either her wonder or her reason. She does not muddle her head until it<br />imagines a necessary mental connection between a horn and a falling tower.<br />But the scientific men do muddle their heads, until they imagine a<br />necessary mental connection between an apple leaving the tree and an apple<br />reaching the ground. They do really talk as if they had found not only a<br />set of marvellous facts, but a truth connecting those facts. They do talk<br />as if the connection of two strange things physically connected them<br />philosophically. They feel that because one incomprehensible thing<br />constantly follows another incomprehensible thing the two together somehow<br />make up a comprehensible thing. Two black riddles make a white answer.<br /><br />+++++++++++<br /><br />Simply abstracting some observable physical data from a mystery doesn't in<br />and of itself put me any closer to understanding the metaphysical nature<br />of the mystery.<br />b:<br />>For example, what a great time we would have on one of these hikes -<br />>as I age I am enjoying increasing levels of pain on the longer<br />>hikes;-) Seriously, if you are ever passing through SD…<br /><br />c:<br />Definitely. Likewise, if you're ever in Asheville, we can hike over Black<br />Balsam Knob (<br /><a rel="nofollow" href="http://lab404.com/plotfracture/whorl/misc/black_balsam_knob.html">http://lab404.com/plotfracture/whorl/misc/black_balsam_knob.html</a> ) to<br />Shining Rock (the very root of all things shiing). Batteries not<br /> ncluded.<br /><br />b:<br />>Btw, we are not making science - we are artists… but the Great<br />>Wall of California is Art, not fiction.<br /><br />c:<br />Ah, but "Lev" himself says that narrative occurs any time something<br />changes stasis (like walking in and out of a room). This is admittedly<br />too loose a definition of narrative, even for me. I have this mental<br />picture of Manovich sitting in the Tate watching the Turner-prize-winning<br />The Lights Going on and Off and getting his fiction on. I think what<br />y'all have going on is a meta-fiction, a fiction-making tool. But it's<br />the nature of open source that allows your GPS experiments to (almost)<br />sidestep fiction, not the inherent nature of database abstraction.<br /><br />b:<br />>I have no problem with aesthetic artists - but they are all so much<br />>more interesting when they do make that contribution instead of<br />>playing with their pixels… I look at data visualization practices<br />>as inherently different from multimedia, or visualizing<br />>algorithms… data vis penetrates down to the data which is derived<br />>from the real. (Regardless of sublime or anti-sublime aesthetic.)<br /><br />c:<br />Fair enough. Although I'd still assert that the best abstract art can be<br />so strong in its pursuit of pure formal aesthetic that it actually<br />achieves a kind of involuntary, anti-denotative concept. Klee comes to<br />mind.<br /><br />Here is a database work I'm doing that refuses to fit neatly into the<br />final dismissive section of your paper (about aesthetic-centric database<br />art not being in dialogue with the ontological nature of the data itself):<br /><a rel="nofollow" href="http://computerfinearts.com/collection/cloninger/bubblegum/ornamental/">http://computerfinearts.com/collection/cloninger/bubblegum/ornamental/</a><br />[click on a card and then it will autogenerate itself every few seconds by<br />pulling semi-randomly from a source database of prepared images.]<br /><br />The idea is to break down this ornamentation into formal elements, and<br />then instruct the software to reconstruct those elements within a given<br />set of controlled parameters. In a way, it is trying to make visible a<br />kind of quantum field of possible ornamental outcomes. I am assuming that<br />there is something inherently "meaningful" about abstract ornamentation. <br />Not denotatively meaningful, not binarily quantifiable, but still<br />explorable via software. It is a simulated exploration of patterned<br />aesthetics. If you simply took a static screenshot of a single<br />iteration, you would have something pretty, but you would be missing an<br />important aspect of the piece.<br /><br />Just because something looks good doesn't mean it's not exploring the<br />real/virtual divide in a meaningful way. Pretty moving pixels aren't<br />inherently meaningless. "When I am working on a problem, I never think<br />about beauaty… but when I have finished, if the solution is not<br />beautiful, I know it is wrong." - Bucky Fuller<br /><br />Thanks Brett. I have enjoyed our conversation as well.<br />+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +<br /><br />Rhizome.org is a 501©(3) nonprofit organization and an affiliate of the<br />New Museum of Contemporary Art.<br /><br />Rhizome Digest is supported by grants from The Charles Engelhard<br />Foundation,  The Rockefeller Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for<br />the Visual Arts, and with public funds from the New York State Council on<br />the Arts, a state agency.<br /><br />+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +<br /><br />Rhizome Digest is filtered by Marisa Olson (marisa@rhizome.org). ISSN:<br />1525-9110. Volume 11, number 8. Article submissions to list@rhizome.org<br />are encouraged. Submissions should relate to the theme of new media art<br />and be less than 1500 words. 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