mirror:
http://deaf.v2.nl/deaf/03/229-119-183-218-9-72-115-238-196-163-241-87-145-46-126-248.pynitting
(EN)
"Data
Knitting"
by Arjen Mulder
* DEAF03
Data Knitting
festival
In 2002, V2_"s activities center around the theme Data Knitting, culminating
in DEAF03.
Media are increasingly becoming means to construct realities, rather than means
to represent reality. Media do not depict the existing world, they replace it
with a different reality, a "media reality" or rather "media
realities". How different media shape reality is a recurrent theme in V2_
programs.
During 2002 and up to and including DEAF03 V2_"s program focuses on the
political, economical, social, historical, epistemological and software-based
implications of techniques for data clustering and data combination. The program
emphasizes the role of interactivity as a method to manipulate, transform and
individually shape media realities. V2_ takes a fundamental interest in the
present; a present which condenses into an archive in front of our very eyes.
In various contemporary views the archive has proved to be a strong metaphor.
Our body has become a genetic archive, now that it has been digitally opened
up in the Human Genome Project. Culture, as found in museums and other art institutes
and in magazines and cultural supplements as well, has been described as an
archive that new art both has to react against in order to be new and has to
penetrate in order to be recognized as art. Our language is an archive of meanings
that can be unlocked by philological methods. It teaches us who we are and where
we come from. The unconscious is an archive of all the traumatic experiences
that define our identity. History is a database from which facts can be arbitrarily
retrieved, and now lacks a unifying story.
It could be argued that the latter post-modernist view on "fragmentation"
and "deconstruction" of everything in the archive of history is related
to the way in which data was stored and retrieved in the early days of the information
age: via non-hierarchical, non-linear search engines. Digitally speaking, all
data were equal then, whether they were text, image, sound, protocol, program
code or whatever. Since the 1990s a new form of structuring digital archives
has emerged. Now it is not just the individual data that are being stored in
databases. The relationships and correlations between the various data are now
also being stored, by using "metadata". Metadata (also known as "tags")
are data that describe and categorize other data. Metadata as means for ordering,
hierarchizing, streamlining and evaluating have become increasingly important
as social, political and economical instruments in what has been considered
an informational sphere free of values for so long.
Information isn"t power, but knowledge is. Knowledge is tagged, or intelligently
grouped and combined, information. Knowledge is the result of the (private or
public, controllable or associative, open or concealed) knowledge management
of data and data clusters.
Archives no longer just hold our past for inspection by historians, tax collectors
and other researchers. We are permanently living in archives: all the sites
we visit on the Internet are being logged by our search engines. All our shopping
is being registered by our supermarkets. Each time we perform an electronic
act we add information to the running archive of our activities as both individuals
and members of target groups. On the basis of such archives the policies for
the future are being planned, from marketing strategies to decisions about where
to build shops. Behind almost all activities in the hard, material world nowadays
there is an immaterial archive, for instance the storage of data from video
surveillance and other security equipment. We are living in the world"s
online archive, or, more to the point: we are living in the world-as-archive,
as a constellation of databases.
Because they are continuously available and accessible, archives have become
an essential factor in acting in the present. One could even say that archives
have become crucial in how the present is created and reflected upon. Archives
are becoming just as process-like in character as the present already is. The
individual"s experience of the present can be increasingly described as
the moment when an "unforeseen" link is forged between dated information
clusters that reach him or her through the media. Why does an archive allow
one connection to be established and not the other? Through which media and
by what software can which connections be made within archives and between them?
And which connections are excluded by those media and software? What role does
the individual have to play in this?
Knowledge can be imposed upon the users of archives, or it can be developed
by them by using strategic tools and agents. A growing number of artists, artists"
groups and architects are developing (software based) systems in which data
are organizing themselves into complex knowledge systems of which the users
are but one of the organizing factors. Databases, software and archives are
increasingly the objective of artistic interventions. How are the connections
that archives do (or do not) make short-circuited and what is the nature of
these short circuits? What is their artistic potential?
In the course of 2002 up to and including DEAF03 V2_ explores our media reality/realities
in art projects, performances, lectures, workshops, Internet projects and cinematic
screenings.