User:Jules/thesisintention

Prisoners of the grid?

Outline

Susbtance of the project (clearing things for myself):
Our position in the world is defined by an intersect of our geographical (local and experienced) and online location (relation to the distant). The positioning of individuals along a shared grid enables relations to be drawn.

If I was starting from the grid and tried to highlight existing relations, I wouldn't break away from the structuring of their prescriptors. If i was for instance trying to reveal a constellation of points already in a relation with each other (my position, facebook, gmail, pzwart wiki etc), I would go along with what's pre-existing. That's what happens with telescopical or browsed landscapes series. I am only trying to reveal a geographical agency to myself.

By starting from imposing a New Matrix over space, relations can be created through an arbirtary way of composing with the grid (there is no pre established (economical?) need for the locations to be associated). Therefore there is a margin of uncertainety on that side. I'm not getting out a shape made of location already assembled, I can imprint a metaphorical shape found within the database onto the Earth. By using constellation, I refer to the most primitive way of finding where we are on the planet, and perhaps one of the most opened.

This means also diving into the grey zone floating between the terrain and the grid. The patterns can associate locations through a digital way of measuring the shape of their agency. The ideal shape and the reality of their agency might be comparable yet not superimposable.

Starting point (problematics of the project itself not necessarily thesis):
GeoIP databases tie locations on Earth and Computer networks together. Data is spread across the planetary into physical locations, we do not navigate from nowhere and access content that is physically embedded somewhere. Locations spread over a planetary scale are put in relation with one another. How to represent these relationships taking their scale and invisibility into account. Can we trust these representations? How can these they become more than just mere representations?

Key words :
Materiality, Technology, Land Art, Location, Ecology, Scaling (Global and Local), Temporalities (Geological, Computational), relations, Site vs non-site, Map and Territory

Land Art and Networked Art :
Humanity's impact on the environment, scale, uncertain evolution of the work (invisible phenomenons applying), human and the planetary, the planet is not reducible to human action, the use of film, (hyper)text, and measurement technics (maps) to communicate about the work by converting it back to human scale. (post WWII consciousness that something happening locally can be enmeshed in something bigger?)

• terms
  

Space is a Network of relations

The behavior of physical objects is dictated by how they relate to one another, which depends on where they lie in space at a given time. (structuring role of space)
From patterning influences we extract space.

Putting the world into a grid

Generating measurement systems as frameworks to map spatial relations.
Aims: navigation, conquest, economical development, security, identification...

Events of dissymmetry(?)

Entropy, earthquakes, server down, link rot, Flash crashes...
-> Construction of a new order/reconfiguration?
-> problem of time scale (fluidity of navigation enhanced by protocols to hide the breaks)

Locality always prevail

“Space is data compression on a massive scale.”
Babour
This compression is powerful due to locality. Locality means the whole is the sum of its spatial parts.
We perceive things through locality but the whole made of everything we can't perceive is non-local and cannot be captured.

Margins of manoeuvre

- acting on the visibility (map)

• maps

Spatial metaphor can be deceptive or surprising (both effects are the result of things we didn't experience locally or that have been experienced but escaped measurements)

- acting on the relations (configuration)

• objects

GeoIP? Triangulation? Graphs of human relations? Constellations?

- Extracting Space (from finding ourselves here to global teleaction)

- Relocating Space – Blackboxed tools of space mediation

- Taking point – regaining a sense of mobility

A genuinely free being is not even said to be "free", it simply "is", it exists, it deploys its power according to its being. We say of an animal that it is 'roaming free' only when it lives in an environment that is already completely controlled, fenced and civilized. In english, 'friend' and 'free' (and 'freund' and 'frei' in german), come from the same indo-european root meaning, 'with a shared power that grows'..." Being free and having ties is one and the same thing. I am free because I have ties, I am linked to a reality greater than me, not because I am alone on my own. Freedom is not the act of shedding our attachments, but the practical capacity to work on them, to move around in the space, to form or dissolve them.

Materiality(?)

• The world is non local, locality is subjective

• The world is dissymetric

Symmetry means things can be composed and ordered according to a common way of measuring. However, evolution means matter cannot be ruled within a static grid for too long

1. Static legacy GeoIP database (unreliable, biased, secret methods)
   
2. Conversion of constellation to Matrix (static model, abstraction)
3. Computer Networks (non static)

Bibliography

1. Roger Caillois, La dissmymetrie,1973 (entropy in reverse)
   
2. Matthew Fuller, Media Ecologies, 2005
   
3. Robert Smithson
   

Also of interest?
- Rosalind Kraus et Yves-Alain Blois, A user's guide to entropy, 1996
- Robert Morris Anti-form, 1968 (Art as process rather than stable objects)
"Permuted, progressive, symmetrical organizations have a dualistic character in relation to the matter they distribute. This is not to imply that these simple orderings do not work. They simply separate, more or less, from what is physical by making relationships themselves another order of facts."
- Antoine Lavoisier? (no loss of matter)
"Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed."

Dump

Dissymetrie

- Louis Pasteur, La dissymetrie moleculaire (1848?) - only as the scientifical root of concept
"The universe is asymmetric and I am persuaded that life, as it is known to us, is a direct result of the asymmetry of the universe or of its indirect consequences. The universe is asymmetric."
http://www.implications-philosophiques.org/actualite/une/la-dissymetrie-des-sciences-a-la-philosophie/
https://www.bibnum.education.fr/sites/default/files/Texte-pasteur.pdf

Entropy

1. Robert Smithson, various essays, 60s (entropy)
   

"By drawing a diagram, a ground plan of a house, a street plan to the location of a site, or a topographic map, one draws a "logical two dimensional picture." A "logical picture" differs from a natural or realistic picture in that it rarely looks like the thing it stands for. It is a two dimensional analogy or metaphor - A is Z"

Materiality

Mapping

1. Theses on Distributed Aesthetics. Or, What a Network is Not, 2005, Anna Munster & Geert Lovink
   

"It could be more interesting, then, not simply to look at the map but at what desires network mapping is trying to satisfy. If cartography has in the past been linked to imperial conquests of space, what space is there left today to conquer; the space between the nodes or even the space of all potential connections and links to be made?"

"Network mapping itself underwent a significant shift in geometry and visualisation around the late 1990s (Dodge and Kitchin, 2000: 107-128). As we moved from the superimposition of flows onto geo-political space toward the abstraction of topology, similarly our understandings of what comprised networks shifted. We became interested in relations, dynamics and sociability as opposed to traffic, connections and community. This change in network mapping visualisation has had advantages and disadvantages – we are now aware that networks are different kinds of formations that cannot be understood according to the old distinctions between society (Gesellschaft) and community (Gemeinschaft). But the increasing abstraction of topological visualisation removes us from an analysis of the ways in which networks engage and are engaged by current political, economic and social relations."