Long Background
- Background:
"Because media offers new techniques for registration, they log us in to reality in a way other than that in which previous generations were logged in to (or out)."
Klaus Theweleit
In the Renaissance the introduction of the printing press first resulted in the need to organize knowledge and collections. Today, living in the "Information Society" our daily lives are enmeshed with technologies and it is the primary concern of many to retrieve and organize data. Our daily lives are defined by state and corporate databases and life itself is being assimilated into genetic databases. Artists collect, analyze, and manipulate data day by day.
How do we digitize our collective knowledge? Michel Foucault pronounced that using a typewriter changes our thoughts and Marshal McLuhan reiterated the change of consciousness caused by the use of media technologies. 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.
Databases are all around us every step of our day-to-day lives. From The Corbis Image Library, the Human Genome Project, and Brewster Kahle's archive of the Internet itself. Popular culture with films such as The Matrix even imagines our lives insight one gigantic database. The idea of an one-fits-all standard for information architectures, an overarching meta-software is deeply alarming. How does the presence of databases change the way we act in the world? Which role can artists play in this changing field of databases? What is counted as art in the tricky tension between information and aesthetics? Ted Nelson's "Xanadu" project, for example, privileges the way information is organized and stored over content. Buckminster Fuller's "World Game" aimed at organizing information about world resources.
What is the conceptual and aesthetic power of databases? Does it really need millions of entries to make a database piece interesting as Lev Manovich claims? What are alternate cultural expressions using databases? How do we structure our digital backpacks, and online briefcases? In the 1970s and 1980s Marcel Broodthaers and Martin Kippenberger commented on storage and archiving practices. How can artists who are, like Andy Warhol, obsessive collectors use archives as deliberate base for artistic endeavor and social commentary? Artists working with digital media often work in the network and are concerned with a new aesthetic that not only involves visual presentation but also invisible back-end data that are organized, retrieved and navigated. When walking through traditional Natural History Museums we see how information is categorized, classified. Artists like Mark Dion and Fred Wilson in different ways worked about this extensively. Different taxonomies divide the arts into time based art, computer art, music etc.
In the same way the standardization of database structures and the assumptions behind categorization and meta data have political implications. The vocabulary that we impose on our surroundings impact the way we think about them. Artists now have have the possibility to play an active role in building information architectures. How can we imagine and produce an art practice for ourselves that attempts to articulate, critique the potentials that databases hold.
