curt cloninger
Since the beginning
Works in Canton, North Carolina United States of America

ARTBASE (7)
BIO
Curt Cloninger is an artist, writer, and Associate Professor of New Media at the University of North Carolina Asheville. His art undermines language as a system of meaning in order to reveal it as an embodied force in the world. His art work has been featured in the New York Times and at festivals and galleries from Korea to Brazil. Exhibition venues include Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), Granoff Center for The Creative Arts (Brown University), Digital Art Museum [DAM] (Berlin), Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art (Chicago), Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, and the internet. He is the recipient of several grants and awards, including commissions for the creation of new artwork from the National Endowment for the Arts (via Turbulence.org) and Austin Peay State University's Terminal Award.

Cloninger has written on a wide range of topics, including new media and internet art, installation and performance art, experimental graphic design, popular music, network culture, and continental philosophy. His articles have appeared in Intelligent Agent, Mute, Paste, Tekka, Rhizome Digest, A List Apart, and on ABC World News. He is also the author of eight books, most recently One Per Year (Link Editions). He maintains lab404.com, playdamage.org , and deepyoung.org in hopes of facilitating a more lively remote dialogue with the Sundry Contagions of Wonder.
Discussions (1122) Opportunities (4) Events (17) Jobs (0)
DISCUSSION

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: An Interpretive Framework for Contemporary Database Practice in the Arts


Hi Eric,

My post about improvisation wasn't in response to your post. It just happened to appear in the thread chronologically after your post.

In response to your post, the standard relational structures of Excel-like databases are indeed powerful; and if one's database art involves such structures, I agree that those rules play an important role in that art. Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think" seems the spiritual godfather of such database structures -- in which case the web is a big database (albeit a loose, wonky, lumpy one).

It seems Brett has been talking about database in a broader (and arguably more "substantive") sense -- beyond the constrains of standard database relational structures -- because oftentimes in database art, the artist writes her own non-standard relational rules. For example, http://lab404.com/cards/ is database art, but there's no relational database "backend." No storage hierarchies are involved. For each card, there is a simple folder of prepared gif images (a base of data). Observe its flat unsexiness -- http://computerfinearts.com/collection/cloninger/bubblegum/ornamental/graf/1.gif [through 14.gif]. Yes, there are DHTML rules governing the semi-random selection and visual re-composition of this data. But those rules aren't the "venue." They are more like the script of a performed play (or the instructions for a happening). It's the resultant performance (the compositional/symbolic results) that interests me most.

As an aside, these two exhibits ( http://artport.whitney.org/commissions/codedoc/ and http://artport.whitney.org/commissions/softwarestructures/ ) do foreground the script in relationship to the performance. But the "storage venue" is inapplicable in these instances, since there is no source "data" from which these softwares draw. So they don't technically qualify as database art.

best,
curt

++++

Eric Dymond wrote:

no, its not the performer, its the venue. Punk rockers are always solipsitic.
But my point wasn't about an abstract interpretation of information storage. It was about the complexity of the system that contains it, which exists through the needs of systems to do better than pack and unpack rows of data. The word "database" exists through the efforts of many. They set about to create a system that stores data based upon rules. We can't suddenly remove it from that environment because it seems poetic to do so.
Rules that determine how and where data gets stored. Those rules developed over the 80's and 90's (from Cobb to Kolodny) by corporate designers.The thread is very good. But I need more substance.
Eric

DISCUSSION

Re: Re: Re: Re: An Interpretive Framework for Contemporary Database Practice in the Arts


I came across this, which seems related to the "ontological" nature of data.

+++++++++++++++++

"Let us begin with a show of hands. How many people here play an instrument, including voice? [All hands are raised]. Thanks, now put your hands down. Of those who just raised their hands, how many play notes on your instrument? [Many hands]. Now, please raise your hand if you raised your hand the first time but not the second time. [A few]. Why?

A: I play music.

You play music itself, not notes. We have two different things: T-O-N-E and N-O-T-E. A tone is an actual sound, a physical gesture that you make with an instrument or voice, while a note is an abstract, culturally defined notation that may be a representation of a tone and may be the stimulus for playing a tone. But it is impossible to play a note on an instrument. You cannot do it. Korzybski, a philosopher in the early part of the last century, was famous for the important epistemological statement that the map is not the territory. The menu is not the meal. If you were to go downstairs to one of the restaurants that surround Carnegie Hall, and sink your teeth into the menu, you'd be spotted as nuts. So the map is not the territory and the notes are not the music. They have great usefulness, as do all maps, but they are not music."

- Stephen Nachmanovitch ( from http://www.freeplay.com/Writings/NewYorkImprovLecture022405.htm )

++++++++++

So the particular, idiosyncratic translation from the abstracted data realm into the "real" realm unavoidably colors the abstracted data in a way that can only be described as fundamentally transformative and necessarrily subjective. (It's a good thing.)

Here it gets epistemological and we're back to the parable of the three (grammatically challenged) umpires:
1. There's balls and there's strikes, and I calls 'em like they is.
2. There's balls and there's strikes, and I calls 'em like I sees 'em.
3. There's balls and there's strikes, but they ain't nothin' till I calls 'em.

John Coltrane might have said, "There's sharps and there's flats, but they ain't nothin' till I plays 'em." Is reading the transcribed score (abstracted data reified as notes on a grid) of John Coltrane's improvisational schemings the same as listening to him play? If you think so:
http://lab404.livejournal.com/5420.html

To put a kind of punk rock fine point on it, "It's the performance, stupid."

http://lab404.com/ghost/defense.html
http://rec.horus.at/music/gabriel/Lyrics/so.html#6

curt

DISCUSSION

Re: Signing off


Well done Francis. You rock the block.

curt

Francis Hwang wrote:

> Hi everyone,
>
> Today is officially my last day at Rhizome, so I wanted to send out a
>
> quick note and officially bid farewell. Actually, this isn't so much
> a farewell, since I'll still be around, just as another member. The
> only difference, really, will be that you will all have to put up
> with my miscellaneous ramblings, without the benefit of me actually
> writing code for you. ("Oh, great", I can hear some of you thinking.)
>
> Patrick May has been in the office since February, and the transition
>
> has gone better than I could've hoped. He'll be in touch with y'all
> soon, but let me just say that he's hit the ground running and
> already has a batch of fresh new ideas to improve the user experience
>
> at Rhizome.
>
> Patrick, Lauren, and Marisa make a phenomenal team, and it's going to
>
> be a kick to stand back and watch where they take Rhizome in the
> future. I'm happy to be moving on, but I have to admit I will miss
> working with and for the other folks on staff.
>
> I will also miss working with the Rhizome community, many of whom
> I've had the privilege of getting to know well over the last three-
> and-a-half years. I've enjoyed having so many people to learn from as
>
> the field has continued to grow. And although some of our discussion
> about Rhizome policy has been, mm, how you say, contentious, I always
>
> kept in mind that it is mostly driven by the desire to see Rhizome,
> and the entire field of new media arts, succeed. Without its
> opinionated users, Rhizome wouldn't be what it is today, so thanks to
>
> all of you.
>
> As for my plans in the near future: Still unfixed, and right this
> minute I suppose I like it that way. I'm actually going to be
> vacationing a bit next month, with old friends to visit in Barcelona,
>
> a friend's wedding in Minneapolis, and then quality time with my
> family in Washington State. After that, who's to say? I'll be sure to
>
> keep y'all posted, in between posting here about hallucinogenics and
> XML and everything in between.
>
> Thanks, everyone. And keep in touch,
>
> Francis Hwang
> ex-Director of Technology
> Rhizome.org

DISCUSSION

Re: An Interpretive Framework for Contemporary Database Practice in the Arts


c:
>You are tweaking one of any number of devised, esoteric,
>man-constructed relationships (in this instance, the relationship
>between land and abstracted/virtual data).

b:
>Also though, we include the social and individual in that
>relationship between land and abstracted data... although the
>individually meaningful resources have hardly been released. My hope
>is that soon you will be able to go to a website and produce virtual
>hikes to follow and so forth. Right now, the closest thing is
>probably any uses to which you might put the 1.0.3 version of the
>API (which is public, GNU), or anyone can download the tracklogs for
>the Rush Creek Wilderness Trail and go.

c:
This open source aspect of the project (research project as
art-making meta-tool) at least allows for a subjective element to be
injected by other artists/users/participants later down the line.
And perhaps if you had enforced your own more overt subjective
narrative from the beginning, your bias would have been embedded into
your tool/approach, and would have limited variable uses later on.
Yes, that seems a fair point.

c:
>I hope you'll allow this necessarily metaphysical assertion --
>without humans to cognitively translate between the real and the
>virtual, there is no virtual. The real tree never falls in the
>virtual forest, so to speak.

b:
>Possibly no. Delanda (rereader of Deleuze who makes a good case to
>recapture Deleuze for the analytic side of the
>continental/analytical split), makes a case for abstract machines
>replacing essences. Every system has manifold possibilities (and
>some impossibilities), but crystallizes or slips into an actual
>state. The actual state is what we tend to call real, but the other
>possibilities for any system are a kind of reality too... and for
>Delanda and Deleuze, these too have qualities and tendencies that
>are important to note. In fact, contemporary computational
>techniques allow their simulation and exploration of real spaces
>that are not yet actual, but which might become. To ref your nuclear
>example - the US no longer tests actual atom bombs - but does them
>in simulation. We can know how a new design will function without
>shaking up the state of Nevada... So I guess our point is that in so
>many ways these predictive technologies now play a role in producing
>both the social and the real material world. (Using software to
>determine if a dam will work there, how fast it will silt up, etc
>plays a role in the decision making about what actually happens...
>and the virtual allows the landscape to enter into the social
>conversation...)

c:
You seem to be implying that the connection between simulated nuclear
tests and the real world is the same (or negligably different) than
the connection between simuated social art projects and the real
world. I'm saying there is a great difference. Just as physics
isn't sociology, simulating the physical world doesn't work the same
way as simulating the social world (although a materialist might have
reason to hope, in x number of years, given Moore's law, etc.). Yes,
you can run predictive virtual analysis on both physics and society;
but encoding, simulating, analyzing, and reifying the social world is
a whole lot more subjective and sloppy than encoding, simulating,
analyzing, and reifying the world of quantum physics. Virtual
environments have helped physicists make better bombs, but they
haven't helped us solve our social problems. It's a garbage in /
garbage out conundrum. How do you quantify, abstract, and binarily
encode the wonder that is human society? Good luck (especially
without the input of the subjective/aesthetic artist).

This quote from Chesterton seems particularly applilcable:

+++++++++++

Here is the peculiar perfection of tone and truth in the nursery
tales. The man of science says, "Cut the stalk, and the apple will
fall"; but he says it calmly, as if the one idea really led up to the
other. The witch in the fairy tale says, "Blow the horn, and the
ogre's castle will fall"; but she does not say it as if it were
something in which the effect obviously arose out of the cause.
Doubtless she has given the advice to many champions, and has seen
many castles fall, but she does not lose either her wonder or her
reason. She does not muddle her head until it imagines a necessary
mental connection between a horn and a falling tower. But the
scientific men do muddle their heads, until they imagine a necessary
mental connection between an apple leaving the tree and an apple
reaching the ground. They do really talk as if they had found not
only a set of marvellous facts, but a truth connecting those facts.
They do talk as if the connection of two strange things physically
connected them philosophically. They feel that because one
incomprehensible thing constantly follows another incomprehensible
thing the two together somehow make up a comprehensible thing. Two
black riddles make a white answer.

+++++++++++

Simply abstracting some observable physical data from a mystery
doesn't in and of itself put me any closer to understanding the
metaphysical nature of the mystery.

b:
>For example, what a great time we would have on one of these hikes -
>as I age I am enjoying increasing levels of pain on the longer
>hikes;-) Seriously, if you are ever passing through SD...

c:
Definitely. Likewise, if you're ever in Asheville, we can hike over
Black Balsam Knob (
http://lab404.com/plotfracture/whorl/misc/black_balsam_knob.html ) to
Shining Rock (the very root of all things shiing). Batteries not
included.

b:
>Btw, we are not making science - we are artists... but the Great
>Wall of California is Art, not fiction.

c:
Ah, but "Lev" himself says that narrative occurs any time something
changes stasis (like walking in and out of a room). This is
admittedly too loose a definition of narrative, even for me. I have
this mental picture of Manovich sitting in the Tate watching the
Turner-prize-winning The Lights Going on and Off and getting his
fiction on. I think what y'all have going on is a meta-fiction, a
fiction-making tool. But it's the nature of open source that allows
your GPS experiments to (almost) sidestep fiction, not the inherent
nature of database abstraction.

b:
>I have no problem with aesthetic artists - but they are all so much
>more interesting when they do make that contribution instead of
>playing with their pixels... I look at data visualization practices
>as inherently different from multimedia, or visualizing
>algorithms... data vis penetrates down to the data which is derived
>from the real. (Regardless of sublime or anti-sublime aesthetic.)

c:
Fair enough. Although I'd still assert that the best abstract art
can be so strong in its pursuit of pure formal aesthetic that it
actually achieves a kind of involuntary, anti-denotative concept.
Klee comes to mind.

Here is a database work I'm doing that refuses to fit neatly into the
final dismissive section of your paper (about aesthetic-centric
database art not being in dialogue with the ontological nature of the
data itself):
http://computerfinearts.com/collection/cloninger/bubblegum/ornamental/
[click on a card and then it will autogenerate itself every few
seconds by pulling semi-randomly from a source database of prepared
images.]

The idea is to break down this ornamentation into formal elements,
and then instruct the software to reconstruct those elements within a
given set of controlled parameters. In a way, it is trying to make
visible a kind of quantum field of possible ornamental outcomes. I
am assuming that there is something inherently "meaningful" about
abstract ornamentation. Not denotatively meaningful, not binarily
quantifiable, but still explorable via software. It is a simulated
exploration of patterned aesthetics. If you simply took a static
screenshot of a single iteration, you would have something pretty,
but you would be missing an important aspect of the piece.

Just because something looks good doesn't mean it's not exploring the
real/virtual divide in a meaningful way. Pretty moving pixels aren't
inherently meaningless. "When I am working on a problem, I never
think about beauaty... but when I have finished, if the solution is
not beautiful, I know it is wrong." - Bucky Fuller

Thanks Brett. I have enjoyed our conversation as well.

best,
curt

DISCUSSION

Re: An Interpretive Framework for Contemporary Database Practice in the Arts


Hi Brett,

[I already sent this to you offlist, but now I guess we're back
onlist, so here it is again to the list.]

>Neutrality? I hope the work is not neutral... at least in terms of
>the kinds of emerging spaces we are seeking to explore or what the
>implications are.

I'm not saying the work itself is neutral (let's say "the work" here
is your Great Wall of California). It's too quirky to be neutral
(that's a compliment). You get brurises on your knees and you get
fatigued and possibly lost and disoriented. It's not like you're
sending bots out to scale the terrain, or projecting a 3D hollogram
of one terrain onto another (a la Lozanno-Hemmer). The virtual
re-enters the real in the same ways as a situationist applying a map
of Chicago to a derive of New York -- it re-enters via subjective
human experience.

I'm saying your paper position claims an impossible
neutrality/objectivity given the nature of your topic (abstracted
data). More below.

>I don't know Wilson's work... but my best guess in terms of an issue
>that might be used to peel back the layers of this problem is
>autopoiesis... ie, real science reveals data and information about
>the real, a real which exists externally and removed from our
>(second and third order) autopoiesis (biological processes through
>which humans and societies produce and maintain our experience...
>which are more or less congruent with the outside, but not a
>representation, nor a fiction.)

We're definitely coming from two different cosmological perspectives
here (an extreme matereialist explanation of phenomena vs. a hybrid
materilist/spiritual explanation of phenomena), but I don't think my
perspective is as easily dismissed as you would like, because it is
germane to the assertions you want to make. Science "works" (atom
bombs blow stuff up), but your GPS experiments don't "work" in the
same way. You're not tweaking abstracted physics equations about
matter and sending them back to have some direct physical result on
matter. You are tweaking one of any number of devised, esoteric,
man-constructed relationships (in this instance, the relationship
between land and abstracted/virtual data). I hope you'll allow this
necessarily metaphysical assertion -- without humans to cognitively
translate between the real and the virtual, there is no virtual. The
real tree never falls in the virtual forest, so to speak.

So a dispassionate, quasi-scientific exploration of the relationship
between the real and the virtual from a purely materialist
perspective -- dismissing Plato as irrelevant to your inquiry,
senamtically dismissing cognitive forms of human subjective knowing
as second and third order autopoesis -- seems slippery, or at least
fraught with contradictions you haven't really addressed. Our
biological processes are by no means congruent with outside
phenomena. They vary wildly from subjective individual to subjective
individual. This subjectivity is not something to quarantine and
ojbectively neutralized out of art. On the contrary, such
subjectivity is one of the things that makes art "mean" differently
than science "means." Your work intrinsically "knows" this, but you
as its spokesperson wants to play it down. I don't think the Great
Wall of California piece would have been as successful and
interesting had you used bots to collect the great wall coordinates
and bots to "walk" the coordinates out in California. Yet your
position seems to claim that it would have made little difference.

>But I don't know if we are on the same track here. Your thought
>about (I will substitute) database as a "performative form of
>fiction" is interesting (indeed, it is at least operational if not
>performative), but I think that (I may be wrong - don't want to put
>meanings in your text that are not there), substituting "fiction"
>for "simulation" ignores the generative (in a material sense)
>relationship that computer simulation can achieve (allowing
>predictive power through action on the possibilities revealed).
>Fiction seems something else to me... a very different way of
>producing possibilities, (no value judgment here...) perhaps because
>it is not bound to actual in the same way.

You're missing an important distinction I'm trying to foreground.
"Database" itself is not a performative form of fiction. Nor is "the
virtual" a form of fiction in and of itself (although it's getting
closer). "Tactical media art uses of database" are a performative
form of fiction. And even your "formalist database art" is a
performative form of fiction. You seem to want "simulation" to mean
"the abstracted virtual." But "simulation" (verb) is not
"simulacra" (noun). Simulation is a performative action. And, as
database interface art foregrounds, this performative act of
abstraction can be mapped into the virtual by any number of
subjective means. As tactical/political database art foregrounds,
the virtual can then be recontextualized and mappend back into the
real by any number of subjective means.

But to claim that "database formalism" is exploring a pure, material,
ontological relationship between the real/virtual is a dicey claim.
Your inquiry into simuation requires you to practice simulation,
making subjective choices that are by definition performative (and
thus fictive) choices. Call it a Heisenberg principle of
abstraction. To recognize and foreground an abstract relationship is
to subjectivise it. There are an infinite number of potential
relationships "pre-existing" in the cosmos between things and their
potential abstractions, but once you recognize one of those
relationships (land vis map, for example), and you begin exploring
the back and forth of it, you simulate/enact/make real that
relationship, necessarily bringing yourself into the equation and
altering the "purity" of the (no longer) potential abstraction. It's
one of those hermeneutical catch 22s of deconstruction.

>Fiction and science are both rigorous in their application toward
>the real, but seemingly with very different methods. Do you
>disagree? The relation between them is certainly due more
>consideration... maybe you can speculate about how David Wilson
>might respond.

I agree. And I'm saying the Great Wall of California is more fiction
than science. And I'm saying science is a kind of fiction (much
moreso than fiction is a kind of science). I wouldn't presume to
fathom the mind of David Wilson ( http://mjt.org ). I just bought
the t-shirt.

>We are interested in the spaces where these computational virtual
>realities come back to and impinge upon the real as a way of
>returning to the real, because simulation has such interesting
>material effects that are not new, but the scale they have achieved
>(participating in rearranging the surface of the Earth), is
>something considerable. I hold to that and suggest that there is a
>role for artists to play in exploring these spaces - which can unite
>data/information with communications, social processing,
>performance, the body, location, and ultimately re-representation.

I agree. And I don't see anything inherently materialist about
database art that disqualifies it from benefiting from the
contribution of the "aesthetic" artist. In several ways, databases
seem to invite such a contribution. But that's another topic.

>If you want to equate fiction with simulation (or in our case
>simulation as "para-art text") and assume these have the same kinds
>of material effects, then I don't think anyone can argue with your
>position. But I don't believe that they can be easily equated.

Again, I'm asserting that simulation is by its very nature a
performative act intrinsically dependent on subjective human
cognition for its encoding and decoding (or abstraction/reification,
or whatever you want to call it). Thus it is a kind of fiction.

>Curt you *almost* have me wanting to do some research in this area!
>(I'm so easy to bait;-) But, I'll freely admit that I don't care
>about parsing the issues relative to fiction quite as much as many
>other artists might... but I would certainly love to read the work.

An (appropriately) idiosyncratic start might be --

FIction:
Baudolino. Umberto Eco.
The Third Policeman. Flann O'Brien.
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. Haruki Murakami.
Faust. Jan Svankmajer.
"Del Rigor en la Ciencia" (On Exactitude in Science). Jorge LuisBorges.
Madcap Laughs. Syd Barrett.
A Child's Garden of Verses. Robert Louis Stevenson. (
http://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/stevenson/collections/childs_garden_of_verses.html
)

Non-fiction:
Mysticism. Evelyn Underhill. (
http://www.ccel.org/u/underhill/mysticism/mysticism1.0.html )
Orthodoxy. GK Chesterton. (
http://pagebypagebooks.com/Gilbert_K_Chesterton/Orthodoxy/ ,
particularly the section entitled "The Ethics of Elfland").
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Oliver Sacks.
Lipstick Traces on a Cigarette. Greil Marcus.

peace,
curt