ARTBASE (1)
BIO
born in 1962 in Lier, Belgium.
studied filology at Louvain, Belgium.
worked a lot in bars and restaurants before i became obsessivly addicted to producing stuff on computers.
i once won a design contest of cgi-magazine and they let me go to New York for four days, that was nice.
i think in terms of writing mostly (or programming, but those are very similar processes for me)
painting is a very different process and i'm very bad at it but i do it anyway because i like the differences it produces and i like the freshness of amateurism, i guess.
what i produce new media-wise is also very much influenced by my daily practice of webdesign and programming with its concerns of usability and the pragmatic approach it implies.
studied filology at Louvain, Belgium.
worked a lot in bars and restaurants before i became obsessivly addicted to producing stuff on computers.
i once won a design contest of cgi-magazine and they let me go to New York for four days, that was nice.
i think in terms of writing mostly (or programming, but those are very similar processes for me)
painting is a very different process and i'm very bad at it but i do it anyway because i like the differences it produces and i like the freshness of amateurism, i guess.
what i produce new media-wise is also very much influenced by my daily practice of webdesign and programming with its concerns of usability and the pragmatic approach it implies.
Absence of N
an alleg(r)orhythm of commands
http://www.vilt.net/nkdee/nstate.jsp
dv @ Neue Kathedrale des erotischen Elends
http://www.vilt.net/nkdee
http://www.vilt.net/nkdee/nstate.jsp
dv @ Neue Kathedrale des erotischen Elends
http://www.vilt.net/nkdee
ending on a note labeled for future reverse engineering (in the
07032006: the Cathedral Mother commenting Landauer
http://www.vilt.net/nkdee/landauer.jsp
greetings,
dv @ Neue Kathedrale des erotischen Elends
http://www.vilt.net/nkdee
http://www.vilt.net/nkdee/landauer.jsp
greetings,
dv @ Neue Kathedrale des erotischen Elends
http://www.vilt.net/nkdee
Re: Re: Re: An Interpretive Framework for Contemporary Database Practice in the Arts
There seems to have occured a slice in the fold of discussion here, which is
a bit of a pity because you two are circling some subjects that are very
important to me. I can't be sure if i'm not missing parts here, so i can
only guess and add somewhat generalising and sketchy as usual:
- that Curt is stressing the importance of fiction correctly from my point
of view along with the bio-evolutionary link to autopoeisis that can't be
thought away from any concept of virtuality, not in the Deleuzian sense
anyway, because the Deleuzian virtual was carefully constructed along the
lines of his 'Bergsonism' in a quite succesful attempt to break free of the
Weismann germ-plasm reductionism (and subsequent reification of the DNA)
before it sort of entered its expansion, explosion into meaning in A
Thousand Plateaus ( i haven't gotten there yet in my Sternean quest, just a
few forward flashes into that book throwing me further backwards)
- that however there's more to the fictional than narration (thanks though,
Brett for the link to Jeremy's work, i wasn't aware of it and it looks very
promising at first glimpse) fiction is both a strategy of codification and
one of liberation of the real, localising time in language (or cinema, for
that matter, soft or hard:-) ,linearising events in recompilable code,
enabling it to create interiors, become autonomous and hence, paradoxically
enabling it to become a force of deterritorialisation. In that way i suspect
fiction surpasses any Peircian model of communication by interiorising the
virtual, producing time while killing it (cf. Thomas Berger's novel),
perhaps Jeremy's work is along that lines towards a supreme fiction, a
perfect Wallace Stevens link to the next point
- that apart from the fictional one could also posit the poetical (i would
prefer lyrical to differentiate it strictly from biological autopoeisis, at
least for the time being) right in the midst here, where there is no attempt
present to localise time, but instead a more immediate link with the real is
mediated through algorhytmically working with resonances and the platina
inherent in the word itself. Here too any reference to language may be
substituted with equal intensities in the visual, although from a cognitive
point of view we're talking about a totally different process, great
painters can write and great poets can paint but not at the same time unless
perhaps they have acquired a Zen control of sorts and calligraphy kinda
entails that possibility. Here the affect would be to spatialise time as
opposed to localising it, but i won't go deeper here into my private
theories of recursive embodiment and energizing garbaging, i suppose it
sounds sufficiently convoluted as it is.
- that i do notice, (this, Brett, in spite of some inspirations we obviously
share) that in dealing with databases people attempting to theoretically
incorporate the tremendous importance they have in a broader perspective
almost automatically transcode C5 habits to approaches of the ontological,
establishing levels of meaning, equating similar constructions denoted with
different terms, reducing the process of reality to managable objects. I see
you avoiding this and trying to escape it, succeeding mostly, but not
entirely getting rid of it. Well, i think its rather funny anyway because it
was Manovich himself who brought attention to that process of transcoding in
the Language of New Media, and that now he seems to be missing the point
that it takes time to query a database and that therefore he needs to get
real mighty quick to avoid simulating the simulated. Still i admire him
much.
For what it's worth, i'd like to thank you both for your insights that are
very helpfull to me because they testify to a clarity of thinking that i do
not possess, with a quote from D.H. Lawrence's 'Poetry of the Present',
written in 1920, a tribute to life itself, and poetry of course:
"The poetry of the beginning and the poetry of the end must have that
exquisite finality, perfection which belongs to all that is far off. It is
in the realm of all that is perfect. It is of the nature of all that is
complete and consummate. This completenes, this consummateness, the finality
and the perfection are conveyed in exquisite form: the perfect symmetry, the
rhythm which returns upon itself like a dance where the hands link and
loosen and link for the supreme moment of the end. Perfected bygone moments,
perfected moments in the glimmering futurity, these are the treasured
gem-like lyrics of Shelley and Keats.
But there is another kind of poetry: the poetry of that which is at hand:
the immediate present. In the immediate present there is no perfection, no
consummation, nothing finished. The strands are all flying, quivering,
intermingling into the web, the waters are shaking the moon. There is no
round, consummate moon on the face of running water, nor on the face of the
unfinished tide. There are no gems of the living plasm. The living plasm
vibrates unspeakably, it inhales the future, it exhales the past, it is the
quick of both, and yet it is neither. There is no plasmic finality, nothing
crystal, permanent. If we try to fix the living tissue, as the biologists
fix it with formalin, we have only a hardened bit of the past, the bygone
life under observation. "
greetings,
dv
> -----Oorspronkelijk bericht-----
> Van: owner-list@rhizome.org [mailto:owner-list@rhizome.org]
> Namens Brett Stalbaum
> Verzonden: dinsdag 28 februari 2006 21:47
> Aan: list@rhizome.org
> CC: jeremy hight
> Onderwerp: Re: RHIZOME_RAW: Re: Re: An Interpretive Framework
> for Contemporary Database Practice in the Arts
>
> One more quick thing that I thought of when I was driving
> around doing some errands... re the issue that Curt has
> identified. Jeremy Hight has a text that I think is somehow
> related. Certainly, it is related to the issue of space and
> narrative. A good read in any case.
>
> Narrative Archaeology, Xcp: Streetnotes: Summer 2003
> http://www.xcp.bfn.org/hight.html
>
> Brett Stalbaum wrote:
>
> >
> >
> > curt cloninger wrote:
> >
> >> Brett Stalbaum wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >>> the virtual is closer to
> >>> the real than fiction - in fact, the virtual and the real are
> >>> co-adaptive in C5's thinking. I don't care about fiction
> actually,
> >>> it is more interesting for me to take on the virtual/real axis as
> >>> something to contest (database politics) or something to
> work with
> >>> and explore (database formalism).
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> Hi Brett,
> >>
> >> This is where your position asserts a neutrality it
> doesn't seem to
> >> actually occupy.
> >
> >
> > 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.
> >
> >> Neither activism nor "database formalism" sidestep
> fiction. Tactical
> >> media is a
> >
> > > performative form of fiction, and "database formalism" seems a
> > philosophical form
> >
> >> of fiction (more like an essay -- albeit with a kind of
> performative
> >> object lesson as its footnote). Even "real science" is
> fiction, as
> >> David Wilson celebrates.
> >
> >
> > 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.)
> >
> > 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. 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.
> >
> >> The only thing not fictional is the ontological one to one
> >> relationship that exists betwen the world and its hypothetical
> >> lifesize map. But as soon as Borges observes and describes that
> >> abstract relationship, his observational "research"
> becomes narrative
> >> (and a resonant narrative, since Borges is a crafty
> writer). As soon
> >> as you write an artist statement or a paper explaining the
> "meaning"
> >> of your GPS experiments, your experiments become their own
> genre of
> >> fiction (particularly when your para-art texts are written
> prior to
> >> the enacted experiments). The virtual may in some sense
> be closer to
> >> the real than fiction (unless crafty fiction is a lie that
> tells the
> >> truth), but your research itself is not the "actual" virtual. It
> >> can't escape being a kind of obtuse fiction about the virtual.
> >
> >
> > You are correct that there is the virtual in a Deleuzian sense of
> > abstract machines and that there is computational simulation of it.
> > Simulation allows a new kind of interaction with those (a predictive
> > one) that has revolutionized science (or maybe more
> accurately, speed
> > it up... caused a phase shift.) 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
> think I have
> > just described my colleague Jack Toolin's project - which he led -
> > "The Perfect View" -
> > http://www.c5corp.com/projects/perfectview/index.shtml)
> >
> > 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. 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.
> >
> > best,
> > Brett
> >
> >>
> >> best,
> >> curt
> >> +
> >> -> 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.
> +
> -> 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
>
a bit of a pity because you two are circling some subjects that are very
important to me. I can't be sure if i'm not missing parts here, so i can
only guess and add somewhat generalising and sketchy as usual:
- that Curt is stressing the importance of fiction correctly from my point
of view along with the bio-evolutionary link to autopoeisis that can't be
thought away from any concept of virtuality, not in the Deleuzian sense
anyway, because the Deleuzian virtual was carefully constructed along the
lines of his 'Bergsonism' in a quite succesful attempt to break free of the
Weismann germ-plasm reductionism (and subsequent reification of the DNA)
before it sort of entered its expansion, explosion into meaning in A
Thousand Plateaus ( i haven't gotten there yet in my Sternean quest, just a
few forward flashes into that book throwing me further backwards)
- that however there's more to the fictional than narration (thanks though,
Brett for the link to Jeremy's work, i wasn't aware of it and it looks very
promising at first glimpse) fiction is both a strategy of codification and
one of liberation of the real, localising time in language (or cinema, for
that matter, soft or hard:-) ,linearising events in recompilable code,
enabling it to create interiors, become autonomous and hence, paradoxically
enabling it to become a force of deterritorialisation. In that way i suspect
fiction surpasses any Peircian model of communication by interiorising the
virtual, producing time while killing it (cf. Thomas Berger's novel),
perhaps Jeremy's work is along that lines towards a supreme fiction, a
perfect Wallace Stevens link to the next point
- that apart from the fictional one could also posit the poetical (i would
prefer lyrical to differentiate it strictly from biological autopoeisis, at
least for the time being) right in the midst here, where there is no attempt
present to localise time, but instead a more immediate link with the real is
mediated through algorhytmically working with resonances and the platina
inherent in the word itself. Here too any reference to language may be
substituted with equal intensities in the visual, although from a cognitive
point of view we're talking about a totally different process, great
painters can write and great poets can paint but not at the same time unless
perhaps they have acquired a Zen control of sorts and calligraphy kinda
entails that possibility. Here the affect would be to spatialise time as
opposed to localising it, but i won't go deeper here into my private
theories of recursive embodiment and energizing garbaging, i suppose it
sounds sufficiently convoluted as it is.
- that i do notice, (this, Brett, in spite of some inspirations we obviously
share) that in dealing with databases people attempting to theoretically
incorporate the tremendous importance they have in a broader perspective
almost automatically transcode C5 habits to approaches of the ontological,
establishing levels of meaning, equating similar constructions denoted with
different terms, reducing the process of reality to managable objects. I see
you avoiding this and trying to escape it, succeeding mostly, but not
entirely getting rid of it. Well, i think its rather funny anyway because it
was Manovich himself who brought attention to that process of transcoding in
the Language of New Media, and that now he seems to be missing the point
that it takes time to query a database and that therefore he needs to get
real mighty quick to avoid simulating the simulated. Still i admire him
much.
For what it's worth, i'd like to thank you both for your insights that are
very helpfull to me because they testify to a clarity of thinking that i do
not possess, with a quote from D.H. Lawrence's 'Poetry of the Present',
written in 1920, a tribute to life itself, and poetry of course:
"The poetry of the beginning and the poetry of the end must have that
exquisite finality, perfection which belongs to all that is far off. It is
in the realm of all that is perfect. It is of the nature of all that is
complete and consummate. This completenes, this consummateness, the finality
and the perfection are conveyed in exquisite form: the perfect symmetry, the
rhythm which returns upon itself like a dance where the hands link and
loosen and link for the supreme moment of the end. Perfected bygone moments,
perfected moments in the glimmering futurity, these are the treasured
gem-like lyrics of Shelley and Keats.
But there is another kind of poetry: the poetry of that which is at hand:
the immediate present. In the immediate present there is no perfection, no
consummation, nothing finished. The strands are all flying, quivering,
intermingling into the web, the waters are shaking the moon. There is no
round, consummate moon on the face of running water, nor on the face of the
unfinished tide. There are no gems of the living plasm. The living plasm
vibrates unspeakably, it inhales the future, it exhales the past, it is the
quick of both, and yet it is neither. There is no plasmic finality, nothing
crystal, permanent. If we try to fix the living tissue, as the biologists
fix it with formalin, we have only a hardened bit of the past, the bygone
life under observation. "
greetings,
dv
> -----Oorspronkelijk bericht-----
> Van: owner-list@rhizome.org [mailto:owner-list@rhizome.org]
> Namens Brett Stalbaum
> Verzonden: dinsdag 28 februari 2006 21:47
> Aan: list@rhizome.org
> CC: jeremy hight
> Onderwerp: Re: RHIZOME_RAW: Re: Re: An Interpretive Framework
> for Contemporary Database Practice in the Arts
>
> One more quick thing that I thought of when I was driving
> around doing some errands... re the issue that Curt has
> identified. Jeremy Hight has a text that I think is somehow
> related. Certainly, it is related to the issue of space and
> narrative. A good read in any case.
>
> Narrative Archaeology, Xcp: Streetnotes: Summer 2003
> http://www.xcp.bfn.org/hight.html
>
> Brett Stalbaum wrote:
>
> >
> >
> > curt cloninger wrote:
> >
> >> Brett Stalbaum wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >>> the virtual is closer to
> >>> the real than fiction - in fact, the virtual and the real are
> >>> co-adaptive in C5's thinking. I don't care about fiction
> actually,
> >>> it is more interesting for me to take on the virtual/real axis as
> >>> something to contest (database politics) or something to
> work with
> >>> and explore (database formalism).
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> Hi Brett,
> >>
> >> This is where your position asserts a neutrality it
> doesn't seem to
> >> actually occupy.
> >
> >
> > 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.
> >
> >> Neither activism nor "database formalism" sidestep
> fiction. Tactical
> >> media is a
> >
> > > performative form of fiction, and "database formalism" seems a
> > philosophical form
> >
> >> of fiction (more like an essay -- albeit with a kind of
> performative
> >> object lesson as its footnote). Even "real science" is
> fiction, as
> >> David Wilson celebrates.
> >
> >
> > 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.)
> >
> > 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. 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.
> >
> >> The only thing not fictional is the ontological one to one
> >> relationship that exists betwen the world and its hypothetical
> >> lifesize map. But as soon as Borges observes and describes that
> >> abstract relationship, his observational "research"
> becomes narrative
> >> (and a resonant narrative, since Borges is a crafty
> writer). As soon
> >> as you write an artist statement or a paper explaining the
> "meaning"
> >> of your GPS experiments, your experiments become their own
> genre of
> >> fiction (particularly when your para-art texts are written
> prior to
> >> the enacted experiments). The virtual may in some sense
> be closer to
> >> the real than fiction (unless crafty fiction is a lie that
> tells the
> >> truth), but your research itself is not the "actual" virtual. It
> >> can't escape being a kind of obtuse fiction about the virtual.
> >
> >
> > You are correct that there is the virtual in a Deleuzian sense of
> > abstract machines and that there is computational simulation of it.
> > Simulation allows a new kind of interaction with those (a predictive
> > one) that has revolutionized science (or maybe more
> accurately, speed
> > it up... caused a phase shift.) 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
> think I have
> > just described my colleague Jack Toolin's project - which he led -
> > "The Perfect View" -
> > http://www.c5corp.com/projects/perfectview/index.shtml)
> >
> > 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. 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.
> >
> > best,
> > Brett
> >
> >>
> >> best,
> >> curt
> >> +
> >> -> 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.
> +
> -> 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
>
Re: An Interpretive Framework for Contemporary Database Practice in the Arts
Hi Brett,
It needn't concern you, but i have now gone through your essay a first time.
I'm very slow at these things but i already concluded it is much more
balanced than Manovich's latest work(that i feel has a very wrong basis to
it apart from being way to prescriptive in its self-promotion) and anything
but the horsething and quite receptible for further scrutiny untsoweiter.
It's a worthy effort, congratulations. I do see some serious flaws, however,
in your scheme of things.
A very basic one, i think, is transcribing the speed of light of
transmission of data to the systems triggering the transmissions. That is a
very Virilian way (although i readily admit to not reading the guy i can
conclude as much from what i gather from second-hand versions- reading
Virilio is simply sth that didn't happen in my life yet, not sure if it ever
will) of transcoding a metaphorical perception of things to reality. That's
just basicly untrue. If things were truly happening at the speed of light, i
needn't bother writing anything anymore, because the connection would be
instant. ( see also http://nkdee.blogspot.com/2005/12/fiction-absence.html)
I suspect this is the very switch that allows him to run the cycles of his
discours, and although i see some nice things coming out of it by way of a
positive critique of overcoming what he deems to be a catastrophic state of
affairs ( to that i would not agree either, -it's bad but only as bad as it
gets, any talk of catastrophy is easily undone by walking out the door
and/or having a chat with your neighbour or by pointing at the very real
catastrophies that crack through our imagined control over things), these
cycles also seem to be headed to an ideological, normative view on art, like
what is so obvious from the quote Eric sent in.
Now i have been postponing a serious investigation of the line of thinking
Manovich is prescribing for lack of time to do it thoroughly, and here i
find you adding a more subtle variety to the strain, a higher quality
product, surely, allowing more openness and avoiding the normative. As much
as i welcome the soberness and quality of thought in it, it puts me back
another step in my Laurence Sterne look alike attempt to explain what the
hell it is i'm talking about. Your essay points to a confusion of terms, i
see something similar in the confusion of ontology with epistemology, and in
the obiquitous use of the 'virtual' to avoid the ditches one might fall into
while taking the step. As much as i agree with discerning a flow from the
virtual towards the material, so rather an embodiment instead of an
disembodiment, i cannot agree with what it is in fact that is getting
'magically' materialised and certainly not with the catastrophic speed you
seem to ascribe to the process, leaving the artist with a very meagre
possibility as a fourth wheel on the database wagon. Relational databases
are very important in our business, but they needn't be the all explaining
base to how we deal with data. They are mere grids, results from (already)
an algorhytmic categorisation belonging to the upper end of episteme. Taking
them for the essence of things is an ontological move into the fictional,
spatialised representation of events, an arresting of energies that is, in
my book, ethically illegal. Basicly it's wishfull thinking, the same
wishfull thinking that inspires Wolfram to a similar ontological move, doing
away with time because he doesn't need it, using science as a
business-driven super scriptograph enscribing his fiction into reality.
In that way, Virilio, or any other theory of catastrophy, is right in
assigning urgency to the matter at hand, because we are dealing with an
ontological disfiguration on a global scale. Time remains, however, there's
always time, because things only get as bad as they get.
Again, there's nothing thorough here,only some hints at what i think could
be substantial objections. I'm hoping i 'll get there some other time
around.
Respectfully,
dv
Dirk Vekemans, poet - freelance webprogrammer,
Central Authoring Process of the
Neue Kathedrale des erotischen Elends
http://www.vilt.net/nkdee
dv@vilt.net
http://www.vilt.net
http://www.viltdigitalvision.com
> -----Oorspronkelijk bericht-----
> Van: owner-list@rhizome.org [mailto:owner-list@rhizome.org]
> Namens Brett Stalbaum
> Verzonden: zaterdag 25 februari 2006 3:51
> Aan: list@rhizome.org
> Onderwerp: RHIZOME_RAW: 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
>
>
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>
It needn't concern you, but i have now gone through your essay a first time.
I'm very slow at these things but i already concluded it is much more
balanced than Manovich's latest work(that i feel has a very wrong basis to
it apart from being way to prescriptive in its self-promotion) and anything
but the horsething and quite receptible for further scrutiny untsoweiter.
It's a worthy effort, congratulations. I do see some serious flaws, however,
in your scheme of things.
A very basic one, i think, is transcribing the speed of light of
transmission of data to the systems triggering the transmissions. That is a
very Virilian way (although i readily admit to not reading the guy i can
conclude as much from what i gather from second-hand versions- reading
Virilio is simply sth that didn't happen in my life yet, not sure if it ever
will) of transcoding a metaphorical perception of things to reality. That's
just basicly untrue. If things were truly happening at the speed of light, i
needn't bother writing anything anymore, because the connection would be
instant. ( see also http://nkdee.blogspot.com/2005/12/fiction-absence.html)
I suspect this is the very switch that allows him to run the cycles of his
discours, and although i see some nice things coming out of it by way of a
positive critique of overcoming what he deems to be a catastrophic state of
affairs ( to that i would not agree either, -it's bad but only as bad as it
gets, any talk of catastrophy is easily undone by walking out the door
and/or having a chat with your neighbour or by pointing at the very real
catastrophies that crack through our imagined control over things), these
cycles also seem to be headed to an ideological, normative view on art, like
what is so obvious from the quote Eric sent in.
Now i have been postponing a serious investigation of the line of thinking
Manovich is prescribing for lack of time to do it thoroughly, and here i
find you adding a more subtle variety to the strain, a higher quality
product, surely, allowing more openness and avoiding the normative. As much
as i welcome the soberness and quality of thought in it, it puts me back
another step in my Laurence Sterne look alike attempt to explain what the
hell it is i'm talking about. Your essay points to a confusion of terms, i
see something similar in the confusion of ontology with epistemology, and in
the obiquitous use of the 'virtual' to avoid the ditches one might fall into
while taking the step. As much as i agree with discerning a flow from the
virtual towards the material, so rather an embodiment instead of an
disembodiment, i cannot agree with what it is in fact that is getting
'magically' materialised and certainly not with the catastrophic speed you
seem to ascribe to the process, leaving the artist with a very meagre
possibility as a fourth wheel on the database wagon. Relational databases
are very important in our business, but they needn't be the all explaining
base to how we deal with data. They are mere grids, results from (already)
an algorhytmic categorisation belonging to the upper end of episteme. Taking
them for the essence of things is an ontological move into the fictional,
spatialised representation of events, an arresting of energies that is, in
my book, ethically illegal. Basicly it's wishfull thinking, the same
wishfull thinking that inspires Wolfram to a similar ontological move, doing
away with time because he doesn't need it, using science as a
business-driven super scriptograph enscribing his fiction into reality.
In that way, Virilio, or any other theory of catastrophy, is right in
assigning urgency to the matter at hand, because we are dealing with an
ontological disfiguration on a global scale. Time remains, however, there's
always time, because things only get as bad as they get.
Again, there's nothing thorough here,only some hints at what i think could
be substantial objections. I'm hoping i 'll get there some other time
around.
Respectfully,
dv
Dirk Vekemans, poet - freelance webprogrammer,
Central Authoring Process of the
Neue Kathedrale des erotischen Elends
http://www.vilt.net/nkdee
dv@vilt.net
http://www.vilt.net
http://www.viltdigitalvision.com
> -----Oorspronkelijk bericht-----
> Van: owner-list@rhizome.org [mailto:owner-list@rhizome.org]
> Namens Brett Stalbaum
> Verzonden: zaterdag 25 februari 2006 3:51
> Aan: list@rhizome.org
> Onderwerp: RHIZOME_RAW: 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
>
>
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>
Re: An Interpretive Framework for Contemporary Database Practice in the Arts
With all due respect, even to Manovich himself for the work he's done with
his Language of New Media, but this is one rhetorical load of horse manure.
I was gonna read up on your piece and subsequent discussion here, Brett, its
title had a nice ambitious ring to it, but after this i think, yawn, i'll
put it off till tomorrow. My god, he's actually trying to put us to sleep,
wanting us to share his wet soft cinema dreams. If it's a joke you got me
fooled. If not,dear o dear, i must conclude you might be an Agent, know then
that our dog's name is Neo and he's getting quite good at catching those.
Darn, did i write this before? They are making changes...Aaargh!!!
Dirk Vekemans, poet - freelance webprogrammer,
Central Authoring Process of the
Neue Kathedrale des erotischen Elends
http://www.vilt.net/nkdee
dv@vilt.net
http://www.vilt.net
http://www.viltdigitalvision.com
> -----Oorspronkelijk bericht-----
> Van: owner-list@rhizome.org [mailto:owner-list@rhizome.org]
> Namens Brett Stalbaum
> Verzonden: zondag 26 februari 2006 19:15
> Aan: list@rhizome.org
> Onderwerp: Re: RHIZOME_RAW: An Interpretive Framework for
> Contemporary Database Practice in the Arts
>
> Manovich's intro to new media reader is very interesting...
> here is a provocative snip that maps to the distinction you
> make between painting and tool:
>
> "That is, not only have new media technologies-computer
> programming, graphical human-computer interface, hypertext,
> computer multimedia, networking (both wiredbased and
> wireless)-actualized the ideas behind projects by artists,
> they have also extended them much further than the artists
> originally imagined. As a result these technologies
> themselves have become the greatest art works of today. The
> greatest hypertext is the Web itself, because it is more
> complex, unpredictable and dynamic than any novel that could
> have been written by a single human writer, even James Joyce.
> The greatest interactive work is the interactive
> human-computer interface itself: the fact that the user can
> easily change everything which appears on her screen, in the
> process changing the internal state of a computer or even
> commanding reality outside of it. The greatest avant-garde
> film is software such as Final Cut Pro or After Effects which
> contains the possibilities of combining together thousands of
> separate tracks into a single movie, as well as setting
> various relationships between all these different tracks-and
> it thus it develops the avant-garde idea of a film as an
> abstract visual score to its logical end, and beyond. Which
> means that those computer scientists who invented these
> technologies-J. C.
> R. Licklider (05), Douglas Engelbart (08. 16), Ivan
> Sutherland (09), Ted Nelson (11, 21, 30), Seymour Papert
> (28), Tim Berners-Lee (54), and others-are the important
> artists of our time, maybe the only artists who are truly
> important and who will be remembered from this historical period."
>
> http://www.mrl.nyu.edu/~noah/nmr/book_samples/nmr-intro-manovi
> ch-excerpt.pdf
>
his Language of New Media, but this is one rhetorical load of horse manure.
I was gonna read up on your piece and subsequent discussion here, Brett, its
title had a nice ambitious ring to it, but after this i think, yawn, i'll
put it off till tomorrow. My god, he's actually trying to put us to sleep,
wanting us to share his wet soft cinema dreams. If it's a joke you got me
fooled. If not,dear o dear, i must conclude you might be an Agent, know then
that our dog's name is Neo and he's getting quite good at catching those.
Darn, did i write this before? They are making changes...Aaargh!!!
Dirk Vekemans, poet - freelance webprogrammer,
Central Authoring Process of the
Neue Kathedrale des erotischen Elends
http://www.vilt.net/nkdee
dv@vilt.net
http://www.vilt.net
http://www.viltdigitalvision.com
> -----Oorspronkelijk bericht-----
> Van: owner-list@rhizome.org [mailto:owner-list@rhizome.org]
> Namens Brett Stalbaum
> Verzonden: zondag 26 februari 2006 19:15
> Aan: list@rhizome.org
> Onderwerp: Re: RHIZOME_RAW: An Interpretive Framework for
> Contemporary Database Practice in the Arts
>
> Manovich's intro to new media reader is very interesting...
> here is a provocative snip that maps to the distinction you
> make between painting and tool:
>
> "That is, not only have new media technologies-computer
> programming, graphical human-computer interface, hypertext,
> computer multimedia, networking (both wiredbased and
> wireless)-actualized the ideas behind projects by artists,
> they have also extended them much further than the artists
> originally imagined. As a result these technologies
> themselves have become the greatest art works of today. The
> greatest hypertext is the Web itself, because it is more
> complex, unpredictable and dynamic than any novel that could
> have been written by a single human writer, even James Joyce.
> The greatest interactive work is the interactive
> human-computer interface itself: the fact that the user can
> easily change everything which appears on her screen, in the
> process changing the internal state of a computer or even
> commanding reality outside of it. The greatest avant-garde
> film is software such as Final Cut Pro or After Effects which
> contains the possibilities of combining together thousands of
> separate tracks into a single movie, as well as setting
> various relationships between all these different tracks-and
> it thus it develops the avant-garde idea of a film as an
> abstract visual score to its logical end, and beyond. Which
> means that those computer scientists who invented these
> technologies-J. C.
> R. Licklider (05), Douglas Engelbart (08. 16), Ivan
> Sutherland (09), Ted Nelson (11, 21, 30), Seymour Papert
> (28), Tim Berners-Lee (54), and others-are the important
> artists of our time, maybe the only artists who are truly
> important and who will be remembered from this historical period."
>
> http://www.mrl.nyu.edu/~noah/nmr/book_samples/nmr-intro-manovi
> ch-excerpt.pdf
>