Cultural Theory & Data-Based Art

Overview

"Memory, the way we see it today, is a storage of codes that allow you to reconstruct information... "

----A. Damasio in: "The Memory as Living Archive", Information is Alive (2003)

"Along the endless boundary of the interface, nothing is hiding."

----Mark C. Taylor

"Whether artists like or not, artworks are always ideological tokens, even if they don't serve identifiable clients by name. As tokens of power and symbolic capital ... they play a political role."

Hans Haacke in "Free Exchange"

Keywords:

participatory online cultures, human rights, access, data knitting, power, interfaces, participation, archiving, meta data, memory, visualization, interactivity, mapping, copyright, data clustering, data combination, city, history, activism, perform data, social network architectures

/ _/ Cultural Theory & Data-Based Art

Cultural Theory & Data-Based Art is a cross-disciplinary course that integrates ideas from data-based computer programming for the Internet, art history, literature, biology, film studies, and cultural theory.

The goal of this course is to prepare the next generation of artists who will be functioning in a computer-mediated culture. It will empower them with the necessary technical, theoretical and historical understanding to meaningfully contribute to the development of new aspects of emerging digital media. In particular, this course contributes to the development of critical approaches to traditional concepts of the database in cultural production. One of the most important developments of the 20th century has been the introduction of the database into our everyday lives, from financial management to inventory processes. In recent years our daily lives became increasingly framed by state databases and life itself is genetically mapped. Jacques Derrida suggests that new technologies do not only change the process of analysis but also the very nature of the knowledge that we retrieve. The entity that structures its own data, its own memory, its own archive- reorganizes itself and inscribes its identity into the future.

Since the 1960's computers were a medium for the storage of data. But it was not until the late 1990's that technologies such as MySql developed which allowed for the introduction of more experimental data-based art projects to the public sphere of the Internet. Initially, artists like George Legrady (Anecdoted Archive from the Cold War, 1994) experimented with the database on the level of archival representation using classical metaphors such as the museum, the archive, or the diary. More recent works have evolved into more experimental idiosyncratic ways of accessing database structures. Audiences access web-based narratives via keywords with the meta-dating becoming a crucial part of the creative process. The search becomes a central part of the interaction with the piece.
In data-based art often randomly collected data are juxtaposed and take on meaning similar to the collage technique employed by the Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov and the American William Griffith. Going beyond interface design- data-based works can address questions and possibilities in relation to the ever-present apparatus of surveillance and control.

The course encourages open source technology solutions such as Php and MySql.

 

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illustr. top: Mark Lombardi at Pierogi