Brett Stalbaum
Since the beginning
Works in La Jolla, California United States of America

PORTFOLIO (1)
BIO
Brett Stalbaum, Lecturer, LSOE
Coordinator, Interdisciplinary Computing and the Arts Major (ICAM)

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO
Department of Visual Arts
9500 GILMAN DR. # 0084
La Jolla CA 92093-0084

C5 research theorist (www.c5corp.com) 1997-2007
Graduate (MFA) of the CADRE Digital Media Laboratory at San Jose State
University.
Professional affiliations:
Electronic Disturbance Theater
C5
paintersflat.net

http://www.paintersflat.net/

Latest: The Silver Island Bunker Trail, possibly the first time humans have walked like a game bot. The trail is open to the public for outdoor recreation and enjoyment.
http://silverisland.paintersflat.net
Discussions (117) Opportunities (2) Events (7) Jobs (3)
DISCUSSION

Re: net art and war in yugoslavia


Hi Rachel,

I guess rockets are in some way new media. The Panamint Launch at Lucky
Jim Wash was a site-specific performance that took place during the NATO
war against Yugoslavia in 1999. The concept was to launch rockets against
a US military installation in the US. When you see the rockets, you will
understand it as, well, conceptual. It turns out that China Lake Naval
Weapons Station has a kind of soft, poorly defined border for those hiking
near its very rural borders - and security forces that are known to make
somewhat arbitrary decisions about what constitutes tresspassing - so to
this day we are not sure how close we were or if any rockets landed over
the border... particularly mine, which went badly off course.

http://cadre.sjsu.edu/panamint_launch/

Among my favorite performances that day were:

HAHAHAHAHAHA! Meiko AndRyu stupid to be on such high art!
by Geri Wittig

Maypole: a demonstration of chaos theory
by Joel Slayton

Still Life
by Mary Jenn

Shoot-Out at Lucky Jim Wash: The (Chinese) Modernist Rocket and other High
Flying, High Art Gestures
by Benjamin Eakins

Muttnik
by Shona Reed

The Lucky Jim Wash - the mixed drink of modern rockety
Jan Ekenberg and Lisa Jevbratt
(Which really takes me back to that lovely but slightly intoxicated
afternoon...)

and by far my favorite:
Red Boy
by Zoe Slayton

On Tue, 21 Jan 2003, Rachel Greene wrote:

> hi -- can anyone recommend shows, projects or texts relating to the 1990s
> war in Yugoslavia (kosovo, belgrade)? I mean new media stuff. thanks, rachel
>
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DISCUSSION

Database Logic(s) and Landscape Art [5/5]


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

http://www.c5corp.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

Endnote:

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

DISCUSSION

Database Logic(s) and Landscape Art [4/5]


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DISCUSSION

German faces jail for 'ironic' remark


http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/2636211.stm

A German man could be jailed for three years over a comment posted on the
internet, in which prosecutors say he belittled the events of 11
September.

In a case which critics say has major implications for freedom of speech
on the internet, Holger Voss stands accused of "glorification of a
criminal act".

Mr Voss, who will appear in court in the western German town of Muenster
on Wednesday, insists his comments were meant to be sarcastic.

He had written a final sentence at the foot of his remarks - posted last
summer on the Telepolis message board - which he says indicates that the
sentiments expressed were not to be taken seriously.

...

DISCUSSION

Database Logic(s) and Landscape Art [3/5]


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

Mountainous: Semiotics, and the precession of semantic models [3/5]

To explore the issues of virtuality in a cultural context, I observe first
that the semiotic context culturally (for artists) is one in which the
precession of models is related to a supposed semiotic reversal of
syntamatic axis and paradigmatic axis within the more general cultural
logic of database. Roland Barthes (generation 68) demonstrated that symbol
systems are capable of taking on additional layers of meaning as systems
of connotation (paradigm) emerge on top of systems of denotation
(syntagm). [20] Lev Manovich (generation 89) demonstrates that one of the
cultural implications of database is that paradigm (model) becomes
increasingly visible in relation to syntagm, speculating its eventual
replacement as the explicit axis. [21] The model (name, address, phone,
email) moves to the foreground, while the story of the population of the
database (first sale, 7 billionth customer served), becomes less visible.
I say that this is the "context culturally" because this axis (in various
positions) has been apparent as an aesthetic issue since the early 20th
century. For example, consider the classic Hollywood style of narrative
film editing (tending toward emphasis of the syntagmatic axis) versus the
paradigmatic montage techniques of Vertov and Eisenstein in early 20th
century cinema. I will raise questions about this bi-axial cultural model
soon enough, but for the present time we need it to chase out those
questions.

This axial semiotic context and its supposed historical shift toward
paradigm are historically simultaneous with the precession of the model
through active digital sign systems. [22] The virtual is not a result of
computation, but rather the virtual was discovered during a two century
period when the resources making computation and model based exploration
possible were developed, including many mathematical discoveries. The
virtual (call it what you will: attractors, abstract machines) was
discovered using these resources, rather than being created by them. It
would be extremely difficult to argue against the notion that the late
axial shift noted by Manovich (somewhat simultaneously with the
postmodern), is not related to computerization and informatics;
particularly the emergence of database starting in the 1960's. And
Baudrillard, for his part, makes it quite plain that "the real is produced
from miniaturized units, from matrices, memory banks and command models"
[23] in his discussion of precession. Hence the axial shift observed in
semiotics is very likely bound to precession in some way through
information systems and the discovery of the virtual. How might we tie
these phenomena together?

A preliminary view is that the precession of models is in fact an
intermediary between the technical logics of database and its expression
culturally. For example, the design of a relational database management
system starts with semantic techniques such as entity relationship
modeling (ERM) in order to build a bridge between the cultural world of
the problem (Customer, Invoice, Order, Part number), and the technical
organization and type of data (such as tables in a RDBMS). Still, the
matter of how precession mediates between the interfacial cultural logic
of database and data as technical form is complicated by the embeddedness
of precession in a context where it can be manifest, simultaneously, as
both a cultural mediator, and within the technical logic of database. Thus
it seems that in order to escape a bad patch of tautological quicksand,
(precession mediates between technical form and database culture because
technical form is also precession which mediates database culture), we
need to distinguish between the analytic mechanics of precession, (where
Delanda's reading of Deleuze might be of help to us), and precession as
evaluative cultural analysis. To some degree, this describes the split
between science and the postmodern, and the analytic tradition and the
continental tradition in philosophy.

Artist/programmer Carmin Karasic gives a brilliant example of evaluative
cultural analysis when she observes that the long financial recession in
the United States in the early 21st century was preceded by a decline in
the stock market, rather than the decline in the stock market being
preceded by the beginning of a recession. [24] In this, we see a situation
where the complex, distributed, abstraction [25] that we refer to as
capital markets leads the rest of the economy in the dance; inflecting
other aspects of economic activity such as labor, production and consumer
confidence more so than reflecting them. Indeed, a casual look at the
general data seems very much to support the thesis. This is the profound
influence of the virtual (in this case, more in the Baudrillardian sense
than the Deleuzian), over the actual (such as jobs.) Many view this type
of analysis as representative of the triumph of precession, which as we
have seen is bound in some way to the foregrounding of the paradigmatic
axis in aesthetics. However, working with this largely metaphorical notion
of precession, as is the tradition of Baudrillard, seems inappropriate for
the kind of landscape as database practice C5 is interested in
specifically because it is largely metaphorical. Thus it is as amicable to
irony and other distractions of postmodernity (such as Baudrillard's
delightful discussions of Disneyland), as it is to insightful observations
such as Karasic's. It is hard to get a hook into the actual mechanics of
economic history through such evaluative cultural analysis. Certainly, the
provocation of the example would leave economists of different
intellectual persuasions arguing on both sides of the proposition.

The notion of precession for our purposes as database/landscape artists is
more usefully defined in a narrow technical manner, if mostly for tactical
reasons. Under this view, data and informatics inflect a powerful
influence over what happens because technical models are precession.
Precession is technical form that mediates culture through database
because we can relate data to everything actual; and "everything is
everything that happens". [26] For better or worse, this suspends the
matter of cultural analysis, (and a lot of problems with metaphor),
postponing precessive cultural analysis at least until we have a clearer
picture of actual dynamics. Another tactical reason to work with technical
models is that it is to the degree that any speculated shift toward
paradigm is expressed in a technical basis of data in database logic that
there is some space for computer artists to work as computer artists. The
models (manifolds, vector fields and phase portraits) we discuss in the
context of these tactics are (at least initially) [27] semantically
stable, thus we might name the basis of the cultural shift more
specifically: the precession of semantic models, which allow for
calculable processes of deduction to perform algorithmic prediction based
on attractors. We view this as an enhancement to the use of connotative
traits such as qualities of character, which were formerly the basis of
prediction and decision-making, in both the arts and in the political
aspect of the landscape.

In a fine example of the latter, explorer, poet and the 1856 United States
presidential candidate John C. Fremont [28] explained, "We encamped on the
shore, opposite a very remarkable rock in the lake, which had attracted
our attention for many miles... This striking feature suggested a name for
the lake, and I called it Pyramid Lake." [29] Today, decisions regarding
'where' are made very differently due to the precessive shift: place is
evaluated through technical qualities derived from data, because romantic
aesthetic analysis of character (such as "remarkable"), can not answer
many of the most important questions we have about the landscape today.
[30] Rather, the task for artists today is to explore why examples of the
sublime [31] are sublime [32] by modeling them and revealing more of their
complexity in relation to other systems. This is in addition to examining
the prowess of our human aesthetic sensibilities [33], which is still
interesting; there is no good reason to jettison the sublime just because
it is romantic. Rather, the goal is to understand the sublime as a likely
indicator of (or pointer to) the presence of attractor(s) which can
ultimately be modeled. Humans are significantly superior to computers in
regards to inferencing; possessing profound abilities of induction as
compared to the computer's profound ability of deduction. Our tact
involves utilizing the participation of people and extremely large sets of
data to enhance and even replace what was once the seemingly boundless
landscape of the 19th century, a landscape which has become suddenly
smaller in the 21st century , with a boundlessness of data relations to
explore.

The precession of semantic models extends even to naming of place, for
example, the UTM [35] system allows the naming of every square meter on
the surface of the Earth in terms that emphasize not characterization but
calculability. Thus we might infer once again that it is the calculable,
mineable, predictable relations of data that function as the primary
aspects of data that drive the real. Data and their semantics tend to
guide the way they are used, almost as cultural reflex. Are artists bound
to work through semantic models in a way dictated by the purposes for
which data is collected, such as "economic, rainfall and surveillance?"
Are the strategies of contemporary data processing (data processed into
information begets knowledge) the artistic Zeitgeist of our time, in much
the same manner that the writings of Edmund Burke [36] influenced the 19th
century romantic style in the landscape arts during that previous era?

[image: 11 286471E 4428277N]
(http://www.c5corp.com/raw_images/pyr.jpg)

The seeming victory of precession and the axial shift toward the
paradigmatic in the regime of active cultural processes may not be as
complete as the tradition of postmodern aesthetics leads one to believe,
because postmodernist thought may in fact be guilty of excessive focus on
emerging cultural conditions as these make the sometimes slow transition
between novelty and ubiquity. Blinded by novelty in a few dimensions, our
observations of the manifold constituting our contemporary semiotic
network culture may be lacking important vectors. The semiotic axis may be
but two dynamic dimensions/descriptors of a larger semiotic multiplicity.
A manifold of undiscovered vectors needing semantic description in order
to approach a complete semiotic model may be required to explain our
cultural conditions. Such inquiry might explain how dominantly syntagmatic
systems co-exist and interact beside dominantly paradigmatic systems.
Through this, it might be possible to explain or predict the instability
of the polar axis.

These propositions can not quite be demonstrated yet, but there are
certainly ample indications hinting that contemporary cultural conditions
do not exactly snap to the axial grid. For example, technologically
progressive cultural assumptions embedded as secondary meanings on top of
primary denotative scientific data can be viewed under the former semiotic
regime of the syntagm, while the use of a database and data mining to
unearth relations amidst large datasets can be viewed under that of a
paradigmatic order through model based processing. Thus there is at least
the appearance of quite possibly interoperable systems actively
functioning in the midst of different semiotic regimes. An even bigger
question mark can be planted in the Earth regarding subject-less
informatic relations. Such relations, if they exist, of course remain
completely uncertain relative to any axial analysis, because this semiotic
context is after all subject-oriented to begin with. We can assume, and
probably must assume, that precession plays a role here, but again,
uncertainty abounds.

These are unresolved questions best addressed in practice. This
preliminary survey of the issues is the only map we have right now. Even
though the shape of the coastline may be a little warped, and even though
we know only a little about the terrain to be discovered inland, we can
say that we are confident about the general shape of the problems that
face artists working with database and landscape. It is time to let the
unexpected modify, fill in, even transform that understanding in practice.
It is a common safety practice to leave a note, or let some friends know,
where you are going (in case you do not come back). The rest of this essay
discusses where we are planning to venture.

[next installment: Multiplicity of the local: Applications of database
logic in the landscape]

[20] Barthes, Roland, The Rhetoric of the Image, Image/Music/Text,
translated by Steven Heath, The Nooday Press, 1977
[21] Manovich, Lev, Database as Symbolic Form, 1998,
http://www-apparitions.ucsd.edu/~manovich/docs/database.rtf,
http://www.manovich.net/docs/database.rtf
[22] This is especially digestible if we recognize that Georges Boole,
Charles Babbage and Lady Ada Augusta Lovelace were all 19th century
figures; that Alan Turing, Grace Hopper, and Vannevar Bush are
contemporaries of the early and middle 20th; and E.F. Codd a figure of the
late 20th century and early 21st century. The simultaneity of romanticism,
modernism and the beginnings of postmodernism is noted.
[23] Baudrillard, Jean Simulacra and Simulations Stanford University
Press, ed Mark Poster 1988, page 167
[24] Paraphrased from a personal conversation, with permission.
[25] Abstract by definition, given that money is an abstraction of market
value.
[26] Ibid. Slayton and Wittig
[27] Such models are often utilized to demonstrate or predict bifurcations
of the system, or critical singularities under which the systems behavior
takes on new forms, including new vectors requiring observation and new
semantics.
[28] http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/today/jan31.html
[29] Ibid.
[30] For example, the insurance industry would never allow a housing
development to be built on an intermittent flood plane, which would be
predicted of course by computer models in a GIS system. That is, unless a
short, inexpensive dyke is easy to build and does not impinge on water
flow into other areas. In other words, topological and geological data
again make the decision, even if the homes to be built there would be
aesthetically pleasing, or "remarkable".
[31] I am aware that Kant's notion of the sublime involves the idea that
the amount of information available to the senses can not be processed,
and that the human ability to inference intuitively under these
circumstances (and the related feeling), define sublimity. But there is no
reason not to suspect that virtuality will not progressively impinge on
sublime, specifically because the virtual has enhanced our ability
(cybernetically) to model and posses cognitively insights into complex
systems. It is likely that the sublime will be constantly forced to
retreat into beauty, but new sublimity revealed, as we ascend a thousand
plateaus, so to speak.
[32] This is the specific area of inquiry for C5's "The Perfect View"
project. http://www.c5corp.com/projects/perfectview/index.shtml
[33] The notion that the ability to use human aesthetic reasoning to
problem solve under circumstances of sublimity is in no way defunct.
[34] For example, it has often been said in the post 9/11/2K1 period that
the oceans no longer protect the United States. We could also refer to the
ongoing cultural debate over Globalism.
[35] USGS, (United States Geological Survey) The Universal Transverse
Mercator (UTM) Grid Fact Sheet 077-01 (August 2001)
http://mac.usgs.gov/mac/isb/pubs/factsheets/fs07701.html
[36] http://www.library.yale.edu/beinecke/sublime1.htm