User:Jules/thesisinprocess
The Juju's big Space Administration project ~(^=^~)
Intro
The [insert title here] project consists in drawing Star constellations over the Internet. IP addresses are grouped together on the basis of their geographical coordinates. Once those Ips are found and associated to places, my goal is to reach what's to find on the other side of the Network. The project holds a relationship with Nancy Holt's Sun tunnels, for the reason that it wants to give the viewer an experience of vastness of the Network and the sense of profound connection with the incomprehensible, be it geographical, astronomical or metaphysical. (as in post-physical)
“In making the arrangements and contracting out the work, I became more extended into the world than I’ve ever been before.”
Nancy Holt
Sometimes the journey matters more than the destination. A process can unveil the particularities of all the steps enabling the result to be achieved. This is how abstractions are turned into reality again. My aim is to activate an abstraction outside the realm of ideas by an agency of human activity, expanded by teleaction. The enterprise holds some analogies with concrete poetry, in the sense that it plays with the terms instead of trying to communicate any information. In-formation has the function to shape the opinions, gestures and interactions of humans. I aim to create a somewhere at a time that hasn't been determined by economic necessity but by personal myth making. Economic necessity means compliance with an order of things that benefits someone else than the people involved within the process. Personal myth making enables the realisation of a different possible configuration between things. Moreover, it underlines the subjectivity embedded within any strategy for spatial configuring. Any sense of order is rooted within a local perspective from which it inheritates properties.
Unlike propaganda, an artistic project doesn't have to communicate any information. To me, art should set itself the goal of unveiling what is of greater value from the within a mediation system than mere information. It can reveal aspects of inhabiting the world at a particular time, from a certain perspective. Moreover, it can work on the agency of people's activity and how their activity combined by the impulsion of creating rituals has tied them together. Any representation through any means constitutes the subjective projection of something that contains a portion of myth. Just like science, a fiction can allocate things a meaning, which can be of equal value, because we never discover any truth of an external higher order of things. The process of the crystallisation of an intuition matters more than all the potential outcome of the gesture it triggered. Therefore, this event's most crucial venue is the mind of its viewers, where they will recreate the journey, may they need to reconstitute it from an archive, a text, a video, a performance. This is how an abstraction eventually gets decoded.
The ___ project is rooted in the fields of Earth works, Networked artistic practices, space exploration, social interaction and poetic intervention. This thesis is an account its process. It is a diary, a fiction and an investigation.
Determining the shape of things to come
Unlike geocoordinates, the system for arranging the stars is not bidimensional. But drawing using the geographical coordinates system means getting these shapes to fit in a cartesian bidimensional space. By doing so, I am leaving off the the years of distance standing between all stars I am considering and taking them with me in the present of when one could see them from. Distance is converted in the illusion of simultaneity.
A database is a Universe of intentions
The central element of the work is a mass of information organised in a certain way through which I have to identify patterns. An algorithm running through computational power will combine the dots and create relations out of places to find out if they match the shapes. This is how I will determine the directions towards which I will send my signals out in the world.
By working with a database one has to learn to comply with its limits. The database contains 2961041 entries, corresponding the the amount of potential stars. 1.953GB of celestial bodies. It is man made matter, space can emerge of a system ordering places. Before the relations are activated all there is consists in data compression. This rose the question of the elaboration of such order. Where do the items come from? Who is in charge of tying places in the world with Network addresses? The methods behind the elaboration of such databases is quite obscure, and. I used the legacy version MaxMind GeoIP database, meaning that I am working with an open source and therefore partial database. One can only access different levels of precision proportional to their financial resources.