User:Eleanorg/1.2/Thematic/Lecture notes 24 Jan

Tue 24 Jan 2012 Thematic Project: Databases & artists

Some cool artworks/projects

Borges - "The Library of Babel"

Often cited; 'information overload'. Reminds us that the idea of the WWW is older than we often think.

Paul Otlet, "THe Mundaneum" (Documentary, 1934)

This never got built in his lifetime, but was eventually built & took the form of a library. Question is: how do you classify information? Working a few years before Bright, but both worked as librarians. See his sketch which envisions the wireless internet - central transmission model, from one person with a terminal to many. Combines the many technologies of the day - phone, film, radio - all combined into a single medium. Examples like this often overlooked in histories of the WWW; possibly because they come from another field - information science.

Vannevar Bush, "As we may think" (1945).

Similar idea of diverse data stored in one place. See animation "Memex": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c539cK58ees narrated with a portion from this essay. Describes a researcher creating "trails" of documents discovered while browsing: "his trails do not fade".

"Internet Shopping" 1969

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0pPfyYtiBc Anticipatory 'advert' for how computers will be used in the home in the future.

Jonathan Harris "We feel fine"

http://www.wefeelfine.org/ - "An almanac of human emotion" - make selections according to certain categories to get quotes from people, all relating to the word 'fine'.

Aaron Coblin, artist, "Data Art: The Sheep Market"

video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Mmb5aSscck website: http://www.thesheepmarket.com/ Uses online workers to draw 10,000 sheep. Made it into a physical installation too - nice juxtapusition of human scale and huge "grid, like, barcode system" of mass workers. Factory aesthetic for digital age... Now he does more purely visualisation projects - Annet critiques for not particularly saying anything, unlike early mechanical turk piece.

Peter Frucht, "iow" (2000-2001)

http://www.peter-frucht.net/works/iow/iow_2.htm "Live Chat conversations are eavesdropped upon and then visually presented in a 3d virtual environment, as a language synthesiser with a permanently changing voice recites chat dialogues out loud." Manipulates scraped language poetically. Nice minimalist installation design, where a single strip of text joins with a slit-like opening at eye level into the room with the projections in.

Mark Hansen & Ben Ruben, "Listening Post" (2004)

Looks even more elegant after seeing crazier, less refined projects like the one above. Reminds me of sci-fi visions of what the interweb could be; as opposed to mundane/corporate reality. Lovely to see that you can actually use the existing infrastructure to make things beautiful.

Thomson & Craighead "A Short Film about war"

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/slide/docs/warfilm.html Shown also by Steve. Grabs images from the web and gives info about where they come from. Creates an apparently coherent film from disparate online posts. Like listening post, nice combination of scraped data and pre-orchestrated narrative/structure. Hard to tell which is which. Becomes less interesting once you realize it's not life, and just a normal cut & paste editing job... Very similar execution to Bodysong.

Heath Bunting, "The status project"

Shown at NIMK. Traces the process through which you have to go in order to become a 'naturalised' citizen. Examining the interface between database, and real people.

C-mon & Kypski, "oneframeoffame"

http://oneframeoffame.com/ Music videos made up of clips submitted by ppl on the interwebs. Reminds me of "In B flat" etc - http://inbflat.net/ . Really conforms to Umburto Eco's idea of the open work, where the artist remains very much in control and "user input" is slotted into a pre-existing frame. Kind of TV model really, like the birthday cards on CBBies.

Dziga Vertov, "Man with a movie camera" 1929

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_with_a_Movie_Camera Another no-dialogue film made up of archive clips. Contemporary version made by Perry Bard.

Further exhibitions/resources: Database Imaginary, whitney airport, tate intermedia art, turbulence.org

Documentary: The Man Who Wanted To Classify The World

The Mundaneum, "a tool designed for world knowledge".
Archive of documents collected by one man, Paul Otlet. Now housed in Mons, Belgium.
Library catalogue was "a miracle... this instrument tht let me use all these books".
Founded Bibliographic Institute. Conceived of the "universal bibliographic index" - plan was to use the existing Dewey system. Likened the system to "a sun, whose rays multiply as they spread out from the surface". Developed Universal Decimal Classification; aim was to create an "objective" classification system. Developed idea of the index card, with coloured cards for devisions and white cards for bibliographic entries. Ordered 72 draw filing cabinets to start making it.
"Starting from bibliography, we arrive at internationalism". Founded international museum.
Designed a dream city, the "World Centre" (1912) where intellectual resources would be stored & made available to bring humanity together. Worked with Paul Anderson.
When war broke out he turned his attention to formulating principles for League of Nations and designing systems to prevent war in future. League of Nations created at Peace Conference 1914. Otlet wanted to get a location for his World City decided at this conference. A prototype was created in the World Palace in Belgium, later kicked out. Location never found.
amazing music!!
Made friends with Le Courbousier, who worked with him on updated designs for the World City.
Conceived of technological equivalent, which would become "the new book" - "the radiated library and the televised book".
"We will need the ark mundaneum" to preserve the archives - on the eve of WW2. Disappointment in League of Nations - "we have got to start again from zero".

Thoughts on Otlet

Otlet raged against fascism & egotistical political squabbles that prevented universal archives being available to the world. Great humanist project to reduce the whole world to classifiable system. Pits himself squarely against fascism. But where the urge to archive crosses over into OCD - attempt to contain the anxiety provoked by the immensity of human experience by simplifying & bringing under control - does it not spring from the same instinct that also gives rise to the attraction of fascism?
Are these 20th century visions of the universal, unbiased archive utopian or naive? Or both?
V. western approach to the problem of memory - contrast with more oral cultures, etc.
Moving story about what seems like a basic struggle in humanity between chaos & order, memory & death, preservation & decay.

Lev Manovich - Database as Symbolic Form (essay)

'Narrative' form (novels etc) vs 'database' structure - no fixed start or end point.
World is essentially unstructured, therefore lends itself to databse structure. But we also want to encode it poetically & form narratives from it.
Not all database structures are made obvious - eg, computer games governed by an algorithm so that they appear to the user as a narrative.
Narrative form re-appears in new media, just as 'database' form is found in old media - eg, you can browse books in any random order, or flip through an encyclopedia. (Eg see Thomson & Craighead 'Short Film About War' - narrative constructed from disparate parts.)
People want narrative, and look for it in database structures. So how do we make narratives, whose parts are stored in a database?
See umberto eco's endless lists - lists have been around forever, all items in a list are equal.

Dominic

About Dominic: Inventor, director, installer and active performer on the international scene, Dominic Gagnon (CAN) considers cinema as a technique for measuring the immeasurable or as a discipline of chaos. Since 1996, he has made public presentations of moving images, invents machines and concepts, performs sound works, built facilities and creates performances in various galleries, festivals and biennials around the world. Dominic Gagnon has produced and directed more than a dozen films / video / documentaries and experimental shorts many of which have won national and international awards. Among others - First prize in Videoex (Zurich), Gold Plaque at the International Film Festival Chicago (Intercom), Claude Jutra Awards (QC). In 2004, Cinémathèque québécoise de Montréal organized a complete retrospective of his work (film, video, installation and performance).

Rip In Pieces America (2009)

/Rip in Pieces America/ assembles homemade short videos that were flagged for their content and removed from the Internet shortly after. Working in a gray zone of copyright law, Dominic Gagnon presents the virtual testimonies of individuals who are all concerned with the future of the United States. They sit alone in front of webcams, sometimes wearing masks or sinister clothes, and proclaim their apocalyptic visions and conspiracy theories with disturbing insistency.

"I was watching video on the Internet and I noticed that certain homemade clips were flagged for their content. As they were disappearing from free hosting sites, I started to save and edit them in a capsule format. Working in a gray zone about copyright, I nevertheless fulfill the authors' will to contextualize their situation by grouping their videos together and more importantly diffuse / preserve their messages." D.G., from the intro sequence of Rip...

Moving content from one container - the internet - to another container, cinema. In order to preserve them.
Real purity of type - men looking into webcams. Like some kind of Victorian specimen cabinet.
All use similar rhetoric etc, drawn from prominent figures like Alex Jone - infowars.com
Interesting that the film at once seems to mock the characters by collecting them into an absurd montage - but at the same time vindicates them, as they have all since been removed from youtube.
Made 2 weeks before 2008 election in US, hence references to martial law etc.
'cyberbegging' - ppl uploading videos about how shit their lives are etc.
Videos more likely to be removed if under 500 views or so - otherwise youtube have to factor in economic damage to themselves by removing content.
Wars between users who flag each others content etc
Problem of storage space to backup videos in case they're deleted
Looking for flagged videos is deliberately not automated - "method filmmaking" - being involved in the process of absorbing all the films. "Making art is not about searching, or looking - it's about falling."
Draws attention to censorship, which "by definition is always silent".
Walking delicate line between maintaining respect for the characters, while editing the videos enough to make them watchable & entertaining.

tutorial

http://www.openimages.eu/
zoom in on images
Tinkebell - female artist, censorship project
chatroulette fake suicide project