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

An Interpretive Framework for Contemporary Database Practice in the Arts


An Interpretive Framework for Contemporary Database Practice in the Arts

Introduction

There are two common notions regarding the nature (or ontology) of data
and information that are important for us to think about when we are
considering artistic practice with database. The first is the notion
that information is disembodied from its subject, and the second is
somewhat of a conflation of the terms "data" and "information".
Political concern stemming from the first notion may be most responsible
for stimulating "database art", but current art practice with database
can be broadly divided into three generally recognizable, though not
mutually exclusive modes of practice: database politics, data
visualization (the latter related also to sonification, and haptics),
and what I will term database formalism. The second notion represents
more of a noise in our at-large cultural understanding regarding the
meaning of the terms "data" and "information" that when clarified, may
sharpen the critical focus on an aspect of data visualization practice.
Honing these two notions will provide us with a critical basis for the
interpretation contemporary database art practices, perhaps especially
as they interact with emerging geospatial and location aware media
practices. In this writing, interpretation is distinguished from
definition and evaluation, as it is in the tradition of analytic
aesthetics. I write from the perspective of a practicing artist; not a
trained philosopher or art historian. Thus I demur, at least somewhat,
on the issue of defining database practice (beyond the obvious), and I
avoid any qualitative evaluation of the examples I give. I only hope to
chart the terrain of a contemporary practice with which I am familiar,
including the work of many colleagues and collaborators. I hope to form
an interpretation of the approaches contemporary artists are taking to
database that I hope will be useful in evaluating this territory.

Data Body and Data Politics

I will start by considering works that emphasize the contemporary
consequences of disembodiment of data/information from its referent,
regardless of whether we are speaking about the human body and its
disembodied 'data body', or other material manifestations of reality and
the data which refers to it. "Information" and "data", in this narrow
context, are viewed as descriptions of the thing described, and are
somewhat conflated terms. (See next section.) Christiane Paul patently
describes the issues that seem to have been in play for artists
surrounding the issue of disembodiment:

"In the digital age, the concept of 'disembodiment' does not only apply
to our physical body but also to notions of the object and materiality
in general. Information itself to a large extent seems to have lost its
'body', becoming an abstract 'quality' that can make a fluid transition
between different states of materiality. While the ultimate 'substance'
of information remains arguable, it is safe to say that data are not
necessarily attached to a specific form of manifestation. Information
and data sets are intrinsically virtual, that is, they exist as
processes that are not necessarily visible or graspable, such as the
transferal or transmission of data via networks."(174)

I will argue that the case is subtly yet importantly different, as this
type of disembodiment is not actually a new phenomenon to the digital
age. Information/data have always been disembodied, and in fact we do
see that the interaction between the virtual with the real is more
tightly bound today, and indeed is more materially generative (yet
contra-abstract), than at anytime in history. Disembodiment is not the
difference making difference that the digital age brings. In order to
demonstrate this, I will take a double tact. First I will look into
history for precedents of disembodied data and information, hoping to
show that "disembodiment" is not a new issue just because we have
entered a digital era. Then I will try to show that it is not the
disembodiment of the referrer from the referent that creates the radial
difference that the digital era has brought, but rather that it is the
nature of distributed, high speed data processing that makes all the
difference because it radically motorizes, automates and makes
ubiquitous the potential for data and information to impinge on daily
life. After presenting this idea, I will make reference to a few
database artworks that I think map to the various assumptions outlined
by Paul, which I think expresses an interpretive critical model in which
artistic practice can be specified in terms of 'database politics'.

It only requires a few examples from history to dispel the notion that
disembodiment is a novelty specific to the digital era. Edwin Hutchins,
in his study of how representations are propagated in systems of
cultural computation, points out that the use of bearing logs in sea
navigation dates back at least 4500 years, and that "Sumerian
accountants developed similar layouts for recording agricultural
transactions as early as 2650 B.C." (124) Cuneiform Tablets, a clay
tablet inscribed with ideograms and numerals (multipliers), organized in
the now familiar column and row format, formed the material basis for
the disembodiment of material reality into a clay media for data storage
of mundane business transactions. And certainly, the notation on a
tablet of "18 unproductive trees" is no more the actual 18 unproductive
trees than some contemporary individual's poor credit history (a common
example of a 'data body') constitutes the breath of individual
personhood. Yet, both such representations are similarly disembodied
data representations utilized for economic control and management. In a
loose sense cuneiform tablets were the first spread sheets, and one
could go further to argue that the first written words and images
instantiate a similar disembodiment of referent and referrer, not to
mention the disembodiment inherent in language itself! This has been a
constant issue in aesthetics from Plato (mimesis) through semiotics
(sign as combination of signifier/signified), and in postmodern thought;
perhaps most notoriously in the writings of Jean Baudrillard where the
sign becomes ascendant and begins itself to relplace reality through
precession.

Similarly, data has for a long time exhibited the quality of being
fluidly transferable between forms of materiality in different
representational media, and in fact transferal and transmission of data
via pre-industrial 'networks' show that data transferal is in no way a
novel phenomenon or a creation specifically of the digital age. Hutchins
gives the chip log and the methods of using it as just one example of
the propagation and transmission of representational states. The chip
log is device consisting of a reel, a rope line, and the "chip": a piece
of wood that would be thrown overboard to remain stationary in the water
while knotted line was let out. The passage of time would be marked by
crew members singing a hymn (maintaining the system's clock speed), and
notations regarding the number of knots unrolled would be recorded in a
log at a regular fix interval. The knots would measure the distance that
the ship had traveled, from which the term "knots" as a measurement unit
for maritime speed is derived. Importantly, Hutchins shows how the chip
log was utilized to perform an analog to digital conversion:

"The log gave rise to a computational process that begins with
analog-to-digital conversion, which is followed by digital computation,
then either digital-to-analog conversion for interpretation or
digital-to-analog conversion followed by analog computation." (103)

Through these conversions, the propagation of representations between
various crew members aboard ship was enabled. Chip logs were utilized as
dead reckoning instrumentation allowing the projection of the ship's
future position on nautical charts; nautical charts which are themselves
analog computers designed expressly for position-fixing calculations.
Logs and analog-to-digital conversions allowed data to be transported,
often in digital form, through a ship wide network of crew members
utilizing different media to perform their tasks; for example from the
memory of the log keeper into the log, then from the log to navigator
who would project the future position of the ship onto a chart at some
fixed interval, and then from the media of the chart to the mind of the
captain who is responsible for the larger journey.

Data and information have qualities of their own, as calculable symbolic
representations capturing measurable aspects of material systems. Data
and information are not only disembodied in some material form of
representational abstraction from their subject (whether clay tablet or
digital electric impulses), but can be recorded and transferred from one
state to another, propagated from person-to-person in local, perhaps
totally linguistic, networks of social computation, or from
place-to-place via encoding into media mobilized by material
transportation consisting of technology such as sailing ships, or more
recently, undersea fiber optic cables. Importantly, this mobile property
of data and information has been at play in human culture long before
the digital era - perhaps as long as linguistic messages have been
carried from place to place by foot and shared among different groups,
and certainly since written (doubly coded) and numeric representations
began to be transported. Additionally, the example of cuneiform as a
particular clay media implementing informational disembodiment from the
material world emerged well before the development of the algebraic
analysis (as early as 1800 B.C.) and the discrete mathematics concepts
(congealing nicely in the figure of George Boole in the 19th century),
that would serve as the catalysts for the development of digital
communications and computational technologies during the 20th century.
The disembodiment of data and information from the real clearly predates
the digital era.

Disembodiment does not mean that data and information, and their
material reality, do not influence one another. In fact the case is
rather the opposite, forming is the basis of the fundamentally
materialist-formalist analysis I am trying to forge here. As I have
indicated in the past:

"This position is supported by Paul Virilio's theory of information as
the third dimension of matter, (energy being the second), in that
information and its effect on identity are not disembodied from the
real, but rather become a integral part of the real world projecting
directly into the body: a network of people hyperactivated by
information machinery which has joined with the body no more or less
conspicuously than the pacemaker or the telephone handset." (1998)

The significant difference making difference that does arrive with the
digital era is the speed with which the relations between information
technology and material systems are implemented: the move from the speed
of hand inscribed clay tables, to ships, to trains, to telegraph, to the
speed of light on fiber optic and radio networks. (This trajectory
roughly paraphrases Virilio's analytic project.) The process has been a
teleological one; the move from writing data on clay storage devices and
the associated literacy to retrieve and utilize those notations in a
local economy has progressed to 'writing' data in informatic media such
CPU's, RAM, magnetic storage, optical and wireless networks, and of
course this too assumes an associated literacy, in the contemporary case
one required to utilize digital media in a global economy. As the
transmission speed of the media becomes faster, the ability of data and
information to impinge upon or embed itself in material systems itself
expands. While clay-based inscription systems improved the management of
a local orchards in Sumeria, information systems today, which wrap the
Earth in fiber optic cable and paint it with electromagnetic carrier
waves, facilitate the transmission of data and information around the
world in milliseconds, allowing a global scope of impact for data and
information. For example, as Geri Wittig points out regarding the
relationship between geographic information systems and the Earth as a
complex system:

"With the increasing use of GIS technologies in a wide variety of
fields, including art, the data networks generated will disseminate into
the expanding networks of information technology. I speculate these GIS
generated data networks have the potential to act as bifurcations and
coadaptive systems..." (2003)

This means that systems which operate, transport and calculate at the
speed of light have greater power become co-operative in the
distribution and creation of the real, causing the disembodiment of data
itself to bifurcate into something more powerful and integrated with
life on Earth due to the speed and intensity of data flows. This allows
data and information to play a more immediate, acute, synchronized role
in the daily life of persons, as well as non-human ecosystems and flows
of materials. It is not disembodiment per se, but rather machinic
catalysis of the relations between virtual and real that is the
difference making difference in the digital era. Further it is the
discrete properties of the digital that enable this speed, as well as
enabling the exact quantification of information, ala Claude Shannon. It
is the catalytic properties inherent in the material basis of digital
technology that allows the analysis of the difference (that information
is) to have a radical transformational impact on every aspect of
culture, society, biota, climate, and to some degree, even geology. The
disembodiment of information from its referent, which is an archaic and
fundamentally ontological aspect of data and information, is now
hyper-activated in real time at the speed of light. And indeed, it is
the consequences of this speed which many artists working around the
issues of 'database politics' have responded to.

A small but representative selection of artists who have notably
responded to the sudden imposition of database as a mediator of power
and social control include the Critical Art Ensemble, Natalie
Jeremijenko, Graham Harwood, and Diane Ludin. The Critical Art Ensemble
were perhaps the first artists to see the looming threat of database on
matters of privacy and power, and to present issues relating to database
theoretically in terms of an agent of social control. In their 1994 book
The Electronic Disturbance, CAE states:

"As the electronic information-cores overflow with files of electronic
people (those transformed into credit histories, consumer types,
patterns and tendencies, etc.), electronic research, electronic money,
and other forms of information power, the nomad is free to wander the
electronic net, able to cross national boundaries with minimal
resistance from national bureaucracies. The privileged realm of
electronic space controls the physical logistics of manufacture, since
the release of raw materials requires electronic consent and direction."
(CAE, 1994)

While we do read here a direct reference to the concerns of
disembodiment in terms of "electronic people", we also see a clear focus
on new forms of pan-capitalist power and control over the economy
through processes where "electronic space controls the physical
logistics of manufacture." This inference on the part of CAE certainly
maps to the notion of data and information as disembodied control
systems of management, but disembodiment is placed in a context that
makes the change less attributable to the original sin of disembodiment
than it is to the speed and ease through which social power and control
over the material world is deployed via contemporary, digital, highly
distributed database systems. CAE's words may be the first shots fired
in the art of database politics.

Natalie Jeremijenko's and Graham Harwood's recent work with database
share a consistent theme: an attempt to address the asymmetry of power
between those who model and manipulate the world through data, (thus
enjoying most of the rights to benefit from information garnered from
that data), and those who are modeled and manipulated by data. A
representative example of Jeremijenko's recent work is the Bit
Antiterror Line project, which allows "every phone [home/cell/booth] to
act as a networked microphone... For collecting live audio data on civil
liberty infringements and other anti-terror events." The files are made
available in a simple database of audio files on the bit antiterror line
web site (Jeremijenko), one of which recounts the story of a stewardess
who threatened a couple with arrest by armed Air Marshal if they
continued to draw silly pictures and laugh at her. Harwood's 9 project
is a website modeled around the simple square shaped layout of 9 media
elements. It allows people to represent themselves, their neighborhoods,
their identity, and their interests, via media elements arranged in this
simple, easy to use layout strategy, including a notion of proximity and
thus juxtaposition with neighboring 9's. The ease of use at the
interface level belies a sophisticated custom database under the covers,
coded by the artist. 9 encourages not only self representation, but the
exploration of the self representations of others in a shared data
commons creating connections between/within communities defined both
geographically and informatically, while Jeremijenko's project creates a
data commons as both an emergency antidote to, and cultural and social
analysis of, the growing fascism apparent in the United States as the
"War on Terrorism" progresses. As I write this (original draft, April
2004), CAE's Steve Kurtz is being investigated by a grand jury in
Buffalo, NY, essentially for daring to make provocative art works with
biological materials. Although he (and CAE) have presented this work
publicly in high profile art institutions for many years, his research
and materials stored in his home became the subject of a wasteful and
misguided anti-terror investigation after being noticed and reported by
first-responders following the tragic death of Hope Kurtz from natural
causes.

The prevalence of database in biotechnology research has led to many
projects dealing with genomic data analysis or critique of the systems
in which nature becomes private property. Diane Ludin's "i-BPE,
i-Biology Patent Engine" takes on issues of intellectual property and
ownership in the high-tech era by setting up a context where real United
States patents on genes are themselves claimed as a kind of public
property/context for remixing and play with the language of patents,
resulting in a "aggressive take-over by i-BPE agents... i-BPE gene
patents will return bio-rights to non-governmental, cultural agents for
revision." (Ludin) In a presently unpublished manuscript, Ludin
discusses, somewhat ironically, how speed has (with its own certain
irony), allowed the disembodiment of data from its referent to return
directly and literally to the site of our bodies, for which the only
prior art is billions of years of evolution. "With the rise of ibiology
the circuit between code and patent becomes part of the super speed
ecology of Bio Capitalism. Ibiology establishes the next level of
command and control culture where artificial selection becomes a
post-human, globalizing, gene profit system." (Ludin) In Ludin's, and
indeed all of the above examples, speed is the difference making
difference that the art of database politics ultimately must address
across a range of practice; regardless of whether the artist is using
database as media to help along the emergence of shared understanding
within a culturally mixed global culture, or responding defensively
(with database) to the onslaught of database driven assaults on civil
rights committed by corporatist or fascist governments.

Data Visualization, Beautiful Information and Sublime Data

A formal aspect of data and information that is often overlooked in
western culture at large is that the terms "data" and "information" have
meanings that are quite different from one another. Although
Dictionaries such as Webster's accurately define the terms; information
as "an informing or being informed; esp., a telling or being told of
something", and data as in "facts or figures to be processed; evidence,
records, statistics, etc. from which conclusions can be inferred;
information", (Webster's, italics mine), popular uses of the terms often
overlap somewhat more than their dictionary definitions allow. Note that
"information" is above embedded in the definition of data, across the
semi-colon boundary behind which "conclusions can be inferred", but
without a cadence or emphasis that would mark information's definitional
difference with the same clarity as it is most commonly defined in
computer science. Information as described above could easily be misread
as synonymous with "facts or figures to be processed", even given
position of the semi-colon. As I will discuss in the next paragraph,
there is in fact an issue of transitory states. Nevertheless,
information is most usefully defined as the conclusions or news of
significant difference that is inferred from the logical processing of a
collection data. Data is defined essentially as being raw facts; whereas
information is mined from processing those facts.

Of course, the situation it is not that simple. At any one time the same
representations (I do not take "representation" to mean exclusively
"visual"), might exist in different terminal states (as either data or
information) on a larger conveyor belt of ubiquitous digital processing.
A simple example: it is common for the output of one program (nominally
"information") to be the input data for another, as in the unix command,
ps -ef | grep brett, which pipes the somewhat lengthy output of the ps
program (information about all processes) to the grep filter such that I
might know only of my processes; information can become data to be
filtered into more specific information. Another potential breakdown in
the distinction occurs due to the graphical user interface, which does a
better job of 'making invisible' the user's control data (another kind
of input), for example in the form of pointing as interactive input
(mouse clicks, mouse drags, etc.) These are definitely forms of control
data input, but they are processed more invisibly than control commands
given on a command line interface, because the visual half life of
clicks and drags as pixel residue on the screen is not buffered as are
commands that remain visible in the terminal shell (visible on screen)
after being issued in a CLI. Nevertheless, ignoring interactive input
and its own important implications, it is still true that data plays its
most common social 'role' in the form of input to programs, and it is
information that is derived from processing data as output; even if the
information is later transitioned by being reprocessed as input back
into some other program (potentially somewhere else in the world). The
ontology of data and information as input and output is contextually
mediated and transitory; existing alternatively between states of data
and information. Yet data is still associated in an important way with
input and information with output, even if the terms data and
information are treated more loosely in culture at large, perhaps due to
being seen adjacent to each other so often, a result of their status as
quite inseparable siblings or perhaps a digital yin/yang.

A good question for the impatient reader at this point would be "What
does this have to do with contemporary database practice in art?" After
all, there is no shortage of clarification regarding the distinction
between "data" and "information" in engineering and the sciences. The
answer is that the conflation of terms seems to pool especially commonly
in the humanities discipline areas, such as art. To be fair, it is a
common linguistic conflation in culture at large and this is indeed
where artists operate, but I do think it merits our attention in any
analysis of the works of artists who are working with database, and
particularly for artists that are working specifically with data
visualization, or the related disciplines of data sonification and data
haptics (as in ambient computing).

Lev Manovich has made a very important observation about the aesthetic
strategies of Data Visualization practice in an essay titled The
Anti-Sublime Ideal in Data Art, (2002), in which he critiques
contemporary data visualization practice in art as adhering to a pursuit
of beauty in the transformation (or processing) of large datasets into
the visual field: the "Anti-Sublime" aesthetic. Beauty is the pursuit of
clarity, balance and transparent form, and data visualization is often
pursued for the sake of understanding or making clear the behavior of
data and the systems represented by data. Beauty in data visualization
is opposed to the sublime: the condition under which the data overwhelms
its viewer, and the viewer's senses are mobilized in a special kind
cognition that allows them to carry on with the formation of an
understanding that is, as it turns out, more likely to be satisfactory
than a random guess. There are many names for this kind of cognition:
intuition, anticipation, instinct, or a sixth sense. The sublime is of
considerable interest to the artificial intelligence discipline in
computer science. Human intelligence seems able to deal with the sublime
condition and can continue to operate intelligently even when
overwhelmed or subjected to context shifts, while discrete computational
machines have not yet proven this ability. In a sense, the holy grail of
artificial intelligence is to create machines that can behave with human
like intelligence when similarly thrown by excessive amounts of data
under variable context.

Interestingly, the definitions of the terms "beauty" and "sublime" have
also been culturally conflated, perhaps even more so, than the terms
"information" and "data". Just as information and data are sometimes
interchangeable terms in common usage, (often taken to mean
information), the meanings of beauty and sublime are today similarly
conflated, (often to mean beauty). The notion of beauty, revealing form
and making cognizable, as the goal of data visualization art works
dealing with large data sets is clearly described by Christiane Paul,
writing of Benjamin Fry's 1999 work "Valence":

"The software visually represents individual pieces of information
according to their interactions with each other. Valence can be used for
visualizing almost anything, from the contents of a book to website
traffic, or for comparing different data sources. The resulting
visualization changes over time as it responds to new data. Instead of
providing statistical information ... Valence provides a feel for
general trends and anomalies in the data by presenting a qualitative
slice of the information's structure. Valence functions as an aesthetic
'context provider', setting up relationships between data elements that
might not be immediately obvious, and that exist beneath the surface of
what we usually perceive." (177, 178)

I do not choose to wade into any aesthetic debate regarding the
beautiful and the sublime in data visualization; I am sticking to my
promise to hold fast to an interpretive framework in this writing. Lisa
Jevbratt has written an essay titled The Prospect of the Sublime in Data
Visualizations, responding in part to Manovich's use of the 1:1 project
(1999, 2002) as an example of the anti-sublime aesthetic. (Jevbratt) For
now, I merely want to point out that in terms of how we interpret the
art practices engaged in data visualization, beauty as opposed to the
sublime is the most critical contemporary interpretive framework in
which such art may be evaluated aesthetically. The criterion for
analysis shifts from the effectiveness of any particular visualization
(and its ability to facilitate an understanding of the data through
beauty), to the roll of the user or communities of users in interpreting
a visualization via their own ontological thrownness, their own
conceptual, computational or cultural methods for processing data, and
their own ability to perceive when facing conditions of sublimity. At
its extremes, the sublime analysis suggests that access to raw,
unmediated data replace visualizations, and that communities should take
democratic control of their own data interpretation in a way that best
balances their exposure to quantities of data against their need to
reduce it to useful information; all of which might only become
practical if formal languages for processing data become standard
educational assumptions for a baseline notion of what it means to be
literate in post-industrial, high tech societies. Microsoft Excel(TM)
can not save us. Artists might be able to play an important role in this
regard: as guides in data exploration more so than as experts in data
visualization.

Additionally, the formal definitions of data and information imply
another framework tightly coupled to the issues raised by the beautiful
and the sublime. Data visualization practice is certainly bound to the
transition of representations between states of being data and states of
being information; and as Manovich points out, most contemporary artists
working in data visualization are seemingly committed to visualization
as information. This is essentially congruent with Paul's discussion of
Fry's work Valence as well as her overall discussion of database
practice; further implying that much data visualization practice in the
arts today seemingly pursues beauty. Interpretively, we may extract from
all of this that the pursuit of information is the pursuit of the
beautiful and that the pursuit of data is the pursuit of the sublime.
The former implies a struggle for understanding, the later an impulse
for exploration, including the collection and generation of new data.
How artists implement their forms of expression between information and
data, and possibly in the transitory states between them, is an
aesthetic issue that maps to the transitory states between the sublime
and the beautiful. Speaking personally, this seems to be an unresolved
area in data visualization as artistic practice, as well as in the
related formal practice that I discuss in the next section.

Virtual and Materialist Data Formalism, Data Mining

In this section, my interpretive framework comes full circle back near
the issue of disembodiment. In the first section of this essay, I
believe that I was able to demonstrate that data and information have
always been disembodied from their referent, and I did so by arguing
from a materialist stance that views data as an important virtual
reality that actually impinges on material reality. In a previous text
titled Database Logic(s) and Landscape Art (original, 2002), I presented
a more radical, though consciously very speculative and provisional view
that data is embedded and operative within the actual through a process
in which humans/data/Earth are inextricably implicated: humans mediate
the landscape with the assistance of data about the landscape, and the
data itself mediates that mediation, not necessarily intentionally, but
in such a way that the actual material Earth now speaks through
scientific data, thereby expressing a voice in conversation with human
culture. In the same essay, I indicate how the term 'virtual' is also
often misunderstood as referring to the imaginary interfacial illusions
that computational systems can create, rather than (more appropriately)
the abstract mathematics of reality (that can be modeled
computationally, well beyond 3 dimensions), that in some sense produces
the actual. In other words, the virtual is itself a real space of
possible physical states for any system that crystallize into the
actual, which is precisely what allows computational models of physical
systems (such as engineering or atmospheric simulations) to have
predictive power. I made this case in order to suggest that artists
should utilize the notion of the virtual for predictive or analytical
practices that reveal knowledge about the world, or better, that emerge
new behavior, exploration and experience. I think this holds for the
humanities. I am in no way concerned if what is revealed functions as
conceptual and performance art, and not as science.

There are many database art projects that demonstrate this analytical
and productive practice which engage with data utilizing an ethos that
maintains an interest in the embodiment (contra disembodiment) that is
implied in the relationship between data and its material, actual, real
world referents. Although I have avoided definition, I would argue that
the preceding does constitute something close to a definition of
database art in the bigger picture, the relationship to materialist
embodiment being the key. In any case, it clearly fits into my
interpretive framework for contemporary database practice as database
formalism. These projects are interested in the actual materials that
are modeled by data, and seek new, exploratory methods of interacting
with the material world that reveal new knowledge about the materials,
or the interactions with them, and that allow data to become a
cooperative co-participant in the performance. For example, Lev
Manovich's Soft Cinema (2001-) uses metadata to dynamically organize a
Mondrian inspired screen layout for videos shot by the artist in his
travels, in which "every clip is assigned 10 different parameters, which
are both semantic and formal, so for example one is geographical
location... how much motion there is in a clip, which is assigned a
number... the contrast, the average brightness, the subject matter...",
and so forth. (Manovich, 2003) The parameters are utilized by custom
software to control the editing of the video clips and their
organization in the layout, allowing data about the (video) data (the
metadata) to manifest itself through being granted some level of
decision making authority and authorship. Manovich's cinema edits
itself; revealing itself in unexpected and often poetic ways that
require one to apply a thrown and sublime mode of paradigmatic
viewership to its interpretation.

David Rokeby's Giver of Names (1990-) and George Legrady's Pockets Full
of Memories (2001) both ask users to interact with real objects in the
gallery space, which are scanned and input into a database system for
further classification and comparison. While Rokeby's approach utilizes
an AI computer vision technique and artificial language processing, and
Legrady's uses a clustering algorithm designed to situate the personal
objects offered up by the audience with their statistically nearest
neighbors, both projects are literally concerned with the relation
between real objects and how they are thus mediated (either by naming
them or associating them with another) as they undergo analog-to-digital
(material to reference) conversion, insertion into a database, and
subsequent data analysis. Importantly, an emphasis on the materiality of
the objects is maintained in the exhibition space. The materiality is
directly experienced by the audiences who interact with Rokeby's
collection of objects lying around the exhibition space that they may
situate on a pedestal for scanning and interpretation by an artificial
intelligence system. In Legrady's case, a personal object if offered up
for analysis. Both systems connect rather literally with the real as an
embodied space to be contextualized.

The near unification of referrer and referent is even more literal in
recent C5 work, (a group of which I am a member), where geographic
information system data (a digital 3D map of the landscape) is mined
through the preprocessing of the primary data into a layer of metadata
characterizing large areas of topography (currently the State of
California), that can be searched via a relational database and related
Java API. (The C5 Landscape Database API.) Mirroring the
Input/Processing/Output pattern common in classic, non-interactive data
processing, C5 takes input samples (collected with GPS), and processes
them to identify the most similar landscapes to the original, but that
exist somewhere else. As preparatory work for The Other Path (2004-)
Geri Wittig set out on a month long trek along the Great Wall of China,
starting in the northwest desert and following the Wall eastward to
where it runs to the edge of the Yellow Sea. GPS data was collected from
twelve separate trekked locations along the length of the Great Wall.
Using pattern-matching search procedures developed at C5 (Amul Goswamy
and Brett Stalbaum), the 12 most similar corresponding terrains in
California were identified. After determining the blocks representing
the most similar matching terrains in California, phase two of the Other
Path search process identified discrete paths within those terrains
expressing similar statistical characteristics, such as simple distance,
cumulative distance, and elevation change. To do this, a swarm of
virtual hikers, implemented as experimental features of the C5 Landscape
Database API 2.0, were unleashed in the virtual California landscape to
explore and generate tracklogs, which were then compared to Wittig's
original "input" Great Wall of China tracklogs. The results of this
search identified the most closely matching virtual tracklogs, which
were then exported to tracklog files, uploaded to GPS devices, and
physically realized by C5 in a performance of tertiary (after the
original, after database) exploration of what is now known as The Great
Wall of California. In this performance, walking works in the tradition
of Richard Long, Hamish Fulton and perhaps even Dominique Mazeaud are
reconceived as input, processed by via database applications that have
been granted the ability to tell us where to go by outputting GPS
coordinates that we are conceptually bound to follow with our feet. This
generates alternative experience and exploration of the landscape at a
time when everything (on the landform surface of the Earth) has already
been explored and modeled. It emphasizes not the disembodiment of
datascapes from their referents, but their intimate connection and
productive capability.

Conclusion

I have outlined three modes of practice, database politics, data
visualization, and database formalism (the latter contra disembodiment)
in which contemporary database practice can be interpreted. The later
formalist tendency, in which database is conceived as virtual context
for implementing a data co-operative mediation of the world, perhaps
most interestingly overlaps in the final analysis with the database
politics. Though largely apolitical at first glance, the formalist
interpretative mode of database art practice is similar to that of
database politics in that the goal of both is to realign the power of
database to distribute the real, albeit for different reasons, as
opposed to data visualization's dominant (but perhaps not universal)
desire to better understand data. Though formalist practice may not
self-consciously attempt to intercede in pan-capitalist distribution of
power, data formalism and artistic data mining practices do conceive of
agency returning back to the hands (or for C5 the feet) of the people
who interact with such systems, although perhaps in a perverse way by
tactically ceding a certain level of arbitrary control to the database
applications themselves. But as long these are at least neutral with
regards to power, and hopefully designed and performed by autonomous
users of the systems in non-coercive ways, there are advantages to be
found - perhaps even political ones.

For one, formalist database practice is in alignment conceptually with
the ubiquity of database in our culture, perhaps encouraging individuals
to develop related expertise for apolitical ends (recreation, hobbies)
that produce ecologies of knowledge that become useful when political
conditions become too onerous for the majority of people. Formalist
practice could be aware that discovering the possibilities and building
novel alternatives (especially when done so by communities instead of
for them), might be just as effective as directly resisting the
distributed, nomadic power of systems of mass subjugation. Also,
database formalism allows aesthetic analysis to move toward and explore
truly interesting, purely formal issues of database itself as a medium.
For example, the relational database model trades maximum processing
efficiency for the ability to maintain ad hoc queries, which may be
consequential in terms of how the material world is ultimately mediated
in particular instances. All three of these conceptual modes of artistic
practice with database are important of course, and they certainly
overlap in practice. None is mutually exclusive.

Interpretively, there is perhaps a fourth mode of practice that it may
be argued that I have ignored. The only other mode of database practice
that is perhaps not necessarily some derivation founded in database
politics, data visualization, or a database formalist practice is
seemingly a multimedia practice that assembles and processes a
'database' of multimedia materials, mixing or remixing them into some
other media forms such as web video, animation, real time video
processing, music, etc. The multimedia assumption insists that the core
of digital media art practice is manifest as pixels on a screen, or some
other output such as speakers, or as interaction at an interface that
produces some kind of visceral or otherwise magically mediated
experience. The mediation is viewed as ultimately flowing from the
identity of "the artist" of course, who is assumed to produce some kind
of political awareness or aesthetic/cultural experience in the minds of
the audience. Often, this kind of very traditional orientation toward
art practice does not consider the elements in the database as data with
their own ontology, and suppresses data's identity into being mere media
elements or samples to be processed, remixed, and assembled by the
artist in an expressive configuration of individual artistic style and
message. Media tools such as digital video editing and multimedia
authoring platforms are commonly employed, and often these are used
pretty much the way that their designers (large corporations) intended
them to be used. There is no reason to think that such software
applications can not be used in other ways (in fact, there are many
delightful examples on runme.org), but in practice such conceptual
repurposings are all too rare. When they do happen, they seem to
transcend multimedia and map to conceptual art practices (often termed
"software art"), and I suspect that my categorical distinctions
regarding database practices would support these. But I am veering
dangerously toward making an evaluation of multimedia practices here.
That is not my goal, so this is a good place to conclude.

References

1. Critical Art Ensemble, The Electronic Disturbance, Autonomedia,
New York.
2. Jeremijenko, Natalie, Homepage for the bit antiterror line
project http://www.bureauit.org/antiterror/, accessed April 25th, 2K4.
3. Jevbratt, Lisa, The Prospect of the Sublime in Data
Visualizations, YLEM Journal, Artists using Science and Technology,
Volume 24, Number 8, August 2K4.
4. Ludin, Diane, i-BPE project website
http://www.thing.net/~diane/i-BPE/index.html, accessed June 6th, 2K4.
5. Ludin, Diane, Deep Harmonization i-BPE, unpublished manuscript, 2K4.
6. Manovich, Lev The Anti-Sublime Ideal in Data Art, (2002)
http://www.manovich.net/DOCS/data\_art.doc
7. Manovich, Lev, Lev Manovich / Interview at DEAF 2003, quoted from
a video
8. interview, selection transcribed by myself. Paul, Christiane,
Digital Art, (c) 2003, Thames and Hudson Ltd, London, ISBN 0-500-20376-9
9. Stalbaum, Brett, Aesthetic Conditions in Art on the Network:
beyond representation to the relative speeds of hypertextual and
conceptual implementations, Switch, the new media journal of the CADRE
digital laboratory, 1998, http://switch.sjsu.edu/web/v4n2/brett/
10. Stalbaum, Brett, Database Logic(s) and Landscape Art, Noemalab -
t ecnologie & societa, 2003,
http://www.noemalab.org/sections/ideas/ideas\_articles/stalbaum\_landscape\_art.html
11. Webster's New World Dictionary and Thesuarus, Accent Software
International, Macmillian Publishers, Version 2.0 - 1998, Build #25

(Original, 2004), first presented at the College Art Association 94th
annual conference, Boston MA, 2006
Panel - From Database and Place to Bio-Tech and Bots: Relationality
versus Autonomy in Media Art
Thursday, February 23
Chair: Marisa S. Olsen, University of California, Berkeley

This essay is dedicated to the memory of Eric Gray, who is responsible
more than any other for helping me establish my interest in computing as
a young person. In 1981, Eric showed me a war dialer he had written in
BASIC on a TRS-80 computer, along with custom hardware enabling his tape
drive remote control output to perform pulse dialing on the plain old
phone network, which he was using (while his parents were away, of
course) to war dial for local modem connections to hack into. I was
hooked. And the hours of playing "Adventure" did not hurt either. On
behalf of your family and friends, we love and miss you Eric.

Also, thanks to Warren Sack. I wrote this after presenting and hanging
out with him in Karlsrue in January 2004, talking about these kinds of
things, and it is really very cool that we both ended up presenting on
Marisa's panel together. Tad and Helen too:-)

\_\_END\_\_

--
Brett Stalbaum, Lecturer, PSOE
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
http://www.c5corp.com
http://www.paintersflat.net

DISCUSSION

Interpretive Sign for The Rush Creek Wilderness Trail


New work added to the new work: A typology of an interpretive trail sign
indexing the Rush Creek Wilderness Trail (Phase 1) was produced for the
University Art Gallery "New Faculty" exhibition, 1/13/2K6 to 3/25/2K6.
The Rush Creek Trail was produced by a C5 Landscape Database API
"virtual hiker" and then followed on foot through the actual wilderness.

http://www.paintersflat.net/rush_creek/
http://www.paintersflat.net/rush_creek/exhibit.html

DISCUSSION

Re: Create an e-annoyance, go to jail


I'd like to ask Marc, so what? What is your point?

Betty Staltoum

marc wrote:

> Create an e-annoyance, go to jail
>
> By Declan McCullagh
>
> Annoying someone via the Internet is now a federal crime.
>
> It's no joke. Last Thursday, President Bush signed into law a
> prohibition on posting annoying Web messages or sending annoying e-mail
> messages without disclosing your true identity.
>
> In other words, it's OK to flame someone on a mailing list or in a blog
> as long as you do it under your real name. Thank Congress for small
> favors, I guess.
>
> This ridiculous prohibition, which would likely imperil much of Usenet,
> is buried in the so-called Violence Against Women and Department of
> Justice Reauthorization Act. Criminal penalties include stiff fines and
> two years in prison.
>
> "The use of the word 'annoy' is particularly problematic," says Marv
> Johnson, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union.
> "What's annoying to one person may not be annoying to someone else."
>
> Buried deep in the new law is Sec. 113, an innocuously titled bit called
> "Preventing Cyberstalking." It rewrites existing telephone harassment
> law to prohibit anyone from using the Internet "without disclosing his
> identity and with intent to annoy."
>
> To grease the rails for this idea, Sen. Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania
> Republican, and the section's other sponsors slipped it into an
> unrelated, must-pass bill to fund the Department of Justice. The plan:
> to make it politically infeasible for politicians to oppose the measure.
>
> The tactic worked. The bill cleared the House of Representatives by
> voice vote, and the Senate unanimously approved it Dec. 16.
>
> http://news.com.com/Create+an+e-annoyance%2C+go+to+jail/2010-1028_3-6022491.html
>
>
> +
> -> post: list@rhizome.org
> -> questions: info@rhizome.org
> -> subscribe/unsubscribe: http://rhizome.org/preferences/subscribe.rhiz
> -> give: http://rhizome.org/support
> +
> Subscribers to Rhizome are subject to the terms set out in the
> Membership Agreement available online at http://rhizome.org/info/29.php
>

DISCUSSION

The Rush Creek Wilderness Trail


The Rush Creek Wilderness Trail is possibly the world's first
computationally derived, unofficial public wilderness trail. It
traverses the backcountry of far northeastern California, extending to
near the border with Nevada. It was first "discovered" by a computer
algorithm called a "virtual hiker" that pre-explored the landscape by
"hiking" through a virtual landscape consisting of data provided by the
United States Geological Survey. The virtual hiker found a traversable
hiking path between the trailhead and the terminus, both of which were
very much arbitrarily chosen by Brett Stalbaum, the author of many
virtual hiker algorithms for C5 Corporation. The results of the virtual
hiker's exploration produce a tracklog (computer file) that can be
uploaded to a GPS device and then followed by a real hiker through the
actual landscape. There is no "trail" per se, only a rugged overland
backcountry track that can be followed with the assistance of a GPS
device. The trail provides beautiful views of the Great Basin desert
environment, plentiful wildlife viewing opportunities, and the unique
experience of comparing the wayfinding abilities of a virtual hiker to
your own wayfinding skills and intuition.

Phase 1 of the trail (From the Rush Creek Wilderness Trailhead to Rush
Creek Spring) was opened by Stalbaum December 27th and 28th of 2005.
Phase 2 (from Rush Creek Spring to the Nevada Border), will be opened
sometime during 2006.

Documentation of the project, the trail, and directions can be found here:
http://www.paintersflat.net/rush\_creek

--
Brett Stalbaum, Lecturer, PSOE
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
http://www.c5corp.com
http://www.paintersflat.net

DISCUSSION

Re: Genius 2000: A New Network


Yeah Max, good to hear from you again.

Lee Wells wrote:

> Hi Max.
> Welcome back.
>
> On 1/11/06 4:00 PM, "Max Herman" <maxnmherman@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>
>>Genius 2000: A New Network
>>
>>MS at www.geocities.com/genius-2000
>>
>>New archival documents at www.geocities.com/genius-2000/[the following]
>>
>>AFOS1.tif
>>AFOS2.tif
>>AFOS3.tif
>>AtTheShop1.tif
>>AtTheShop2.tif
>>AtTheShop3.tif
>>AtTheShop4.tif
>>AtTheShop5.tif
>>AtTheShop6.tif
>>AtTheShop7.tif
>>CV1997.tif
>>DossierProposal1998a.tif
>>DossierProposal1998b.tif
>>DossierProposal1998c.tif
>>DossierProposal1998d.tif
>>Fellowship.tif
>>Fowler1a.tif
>>Fowler1b.tif
>>Fowler1c.tif
>>Fowler1d.tif
>>Fowler1e.tif
>>Fowler1f.tif
>>Fowler2a.tif
>>Fowler2b.tif
>>Fowler2c.tif
>>Fowler2d.tif
>>Fowler2e.tif
>>Fowler2f.tif
>>Fowler3a.tif
>>Fowler3b.tif
>>Fowler3c.tif
>>Fowler3d.tif
>>Fowler3e.tif
>>Fowler3f.tif
>>Fowler3g.tif
>>Fowler3h.tif
>>Fowler4a.tif
>>Fowler4b.tif
>>Fowler4c.tif
>>Fowler4d.tif
>>Fowler4e.tif
>>Gingerich1a.tif
>>Gingerich1b.tif
>>Gingerich1c.tif
>>Gingerich1d.tif
>>Gingerich1e.tif
>>Gingerich1f.tif
>>Gingerich1g.tif
>>Gingerich2a.tif
>>Gingerich2b.tif
>>Gingerich2c.tif
>>Gingerich2d.tif
>>Gingerich2e.tif
>>Gingerich2f.tif
>>Gingerich2g.tif
>>Gingerich3a.tif
>>Gingerich3b.tif
>>Gingerich3c.tif
>>Gingerich3d.tif
>>Gingerich3e.tif
>>Gingerich3f.tif
>>Gingerich3g.tif
>>Gingerich3h.tif
>>Gingerich3i.tif
>>Guilbaut1.tif
>>Guilbaut2.tif
>>Habermas1.tif
>>Habermas2.tif
>>Hawthorne1.tif
>>Hawthorne2.tif
>>Hawthorne3.tif
>>HuckFinn1.tif
>>HuckFinn2.tif
>>HuckFinn3.tif
>>HuckFinn4.tif
>>HuckFinn5.tif
>>HuckFinn6.tif
>>Kalaida1a.tif
>>Kalaida1b.tif
>>Kalaida1c.tif
>>Kalaida1d.tif
>>Kalaida1e.tif
>>Mailer1.tif
>>Mailer2.tif
>>Melville1991a.tif
>>Melville1991b.tif
>>Melville1991c.tif
>>ParadiseLost1.tif
>>ParadiseLost2.tif
>>ParadiseLost3.tif
>>ParadiseLost4.tif
>>ParadiseLost5.tif
>>ParadiseLost6.tif
>>ParadiseLost7.tif
>>ParadiseLost8.tif
>>ParadiseLost9.tif
>>RecommendationLetter.tif
>>Skepticism1993a.tif
>>Skepticism1993b.tif
>>Skepticism1993c.tif
>>Skepticism1993d.tif
>>Skepticism1993e.tif
>>Skepticism1993f.tif
>>Skepticism1993g.tif
>>Skepticism1993h.tif
>>Skepticism1993i.tif
>>Skepticism1993j.tif
>>Skepticism1993k.tif
>>Transcript1.tif
>>Transcript2.tif
>>Transcript3.tif
>>Transcript4.tif
>>Transcript5.tif
>>Trilling1.tif
>>Trilling2.tif
>>Trilling3.tif
>>ViewersGuide1.tif
>>ViewersGuide2.tif
>>WDIIa.tif
>>WDIIb.tif
>>WDIIc.tif
>>WDIId.tif
>>WDIIe.tif
>>WDIIf.tif
>>WDIIg.tif
>>Yeats1.tif
>>Yeats10.tif
>>Yeats11.tif
>>Yeats12.tif
>>Yeats13.tif
>>Yeats14.tif
>>Yeats15.tif
>>Yeats16.tif
>>Yeats17.tif
>>Yeats2.tif
>>Yeats3.tif
>>Yeats4.tif
>>Yeats5.tif
>>Yeats6.tif
>>Yeats7.tif
>>Yeats8.tif
>>Yeats9.tif
>>+
>>-> post: list@rhizome.org
>>-> questions: info@rhizome.org
>>-> subscribe/unsubscribe: http://rhizome.org/preferences/subscribe.rhiz
>>-> give: http://rhizome.org/support
>>+
>>Subscribers to Rhizome are subject to the terms set out in the
>>Membership Agreement available online at http://rhizome.org/info/29.php
>
>

--
Brett Stalbaum, Lecturer, PSOE
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
http://www.c5corp.com
http://www.paintersflat.net

Info for students, winter quarter 2K6:
-ICAM and Media (computing emphasis) faculty advising:
Tuesday 1-2PM, VAF 206, Contact via email stalbaum@ucsd.edu
-Vis 40/ICAM 40 (Introduction/Computing in Arts) office hour:
Tuesday 2-3PM, VAF 206, Contact via WebCT
-Vis 141A (Computer Programming/Arts I) office hour:
Tuesday 3-4PM, VAF 206, Contact: via WebCT
- Notes:
Week 7 (Feb 21st) No office hours today
Finals Week (March 21st) Yes.