Cultural Theory

1
Cultural Theory Data-based Art-- week 3
---summary of material covered to date(Manovich
text Database as symbolic form ,term Database,
Montage)-URL for ppt lectures-suggested
book Php and MySql, publ. by Peachpit
Press-examples of the week --gt online data-based
artBabel Simon Biggs They Rule Josh
OnNineexcerpts from DVDs Battleship
Potemkin by Sergej EisensteinBirth of a
Nationby William Griffith
2
http//128.205.122.10/trebor/dms420/lect.week1.h
tmlect.week2.htmlect.week3.htm etc
3
RepeatThe most obvious property of the new
medium is its encyclopedic capacity.V. Bush
the world is a challenging mazeJL. Borges
Garden of Forking Path-a book that has the shape
of a labyrinth that folds back upon itselfboth
library shelf is no longer an adequate map of
knowledge, book-based organizational structures
are too slow for contemporary scholarship
4
RepeatA montage (literally "putting together")
is a form of movie collage consisting of a series
of short shots which are edited into a coherent
sequence. D. W. Griifith was one of the early
proponents of montage, introducing
cross-cutting to show parallel action in
different locations. Be aware that before that
film was a continuous shot laying out a
narrative. A film without cuts is hard to imagine
today.Relevance In similar ways many
data-based artworksuse relational databases to
pull in, to juxtaposecontent (images, text,
video etc) to create a variety of meanings.
5
1) DefinitionWhat is a database? Our lives
are being defined by databases. Let's take that
same technology and turn it around.A collection
of structured content (it does not have to be
digital, ie. a phone book, a stamp collection, a
collection of similar types of things).A
database is a collection of data stored on a
computer storage medium, such as a disk, that can
be used for more than one purpose.  .
6
Simon Biggs Babel, based on the
biblical Babel- the place in which all languages
are mixed up, entangled, and blurred. A place of
confusion and chaos. What is the role of the
library in 2004? In 1870 Melvil Dewey set up a
Decimal Classification System as a way to
classify all forms of written text by discipline.
Ten main classes organize the entire world
knowledge. It was mainly used in physical
libraries. As the areas of activity change new
disciplines emerge, ie genetics was not on the
map back in 1872.Biggs has created a 3D
representation of the numbering scheme of the
DDC, which "Babel" then uses as an interface to
navigate the World Wide Web. Biggs piece
points to the collapse of the big concept- from
the database it reveals little, fractious pieces
of data at a time, without big hierarchies.The
Dewsey System has been maintained as a way to put
books on shelves, but it has also been
supplemented , networked, in databases with
information such as keywords, author
information, et cetera. It is this contrast
between a hierarchical tree and a network that
babel makes visible.Babel takes classification
structures and translates them into hierarchies
such asarts recreation architecture public
structures correctional institutions.
http//www.babel.uk.net/- .
7
Babel Babel then links to a selected web
site about correctional institutions, using the
DDC, in essence, to catalog the Web as well as
navigate it.This conflation of cataloging and
navigation - of metadata (the cataloging
information) and data (the website itself) - is
one of the distinctive characteristics of
computational media.. This is a function of
computing, which one of the early pioneers of the
medium, Alan Turing, described when he realized
that any string of words - any information, no
matter how complex - could be translated into a
string of numbers The computer is then able to
manipulate those numbers mathematically, so to
speak, and "untranslate" them back into words,
which is why the computer is known as a language
machine, because of it's human-like capacity to
manipulate the binary language of ones and zeros
and output the results as human-readable
information such as words or images."Computers
both produce the material we experience and allow
us to access it." Simon Biggsthe computer is
the medium that can be any medium.
8
Babel Looking at the way artists like Paik
began to investigate the deliberate misuse of
technology in the 1960s helps debunk some
contemporary myths about creativity - in
particular, the creative use of technology. One
of those myths is that creativity lies in
applying the right tool for the right task -
i.e., managing technologyMagazine editors,
advertising execs, and Web site producers
regularly employ "creatives" to spice up their
products. The assumption behind this ludicrous
adjective-turned-noun is that a creative person
is simply a painter of pictures or a teller of
stories - especially one adept at Photoshop or
AfterEffects.When you manage technology well,
you are simply carrying out the agenda of the
designers of that technology. A composer who uses
a car to drive to the concert hall is managing
technology. But when Laurie Anderson composed a
drive-in concert of motorists beeping car horns,
she was being creative."
9
Babel
10
BabelPart of the project's initial appeal for
the user is precisely its implicit promise of
"debabelizing" the information overload of the
Internet by using the DDC to classify it. he
resulting chaos can just as easily be seen as
beauty as a fall from grace as in the biblical
story. Biggs suggests that it is a "site
specific" work.The boundaries of where we
link-travel become the contours of what we know.
Performance and place are conflated. It is like
light, which can be particles or waves, depending
upon how it is measured. The idea of Babel can be
the loss of unity or the rise of diversity the
site of all knowledge or the absence of any
certainty a means of navigation or a way to get
lost the beauty of systems or the beauty of
chaos. Perhaps "Babel" is site-specific. Perhaps
the library is a process of exploration.
11

12

Definition Culture The sum of all cultural
expressions and habits at a given
local. Art The cultural expression of human
experiences. It is never neutral in what it
express, it is always political, it always
supports somebodys interests. The obvious
example is the sponsor, museums board etc. But
otherwise you may ask What is not talked about?
What does it mean to paint a flower still life or
a create a purely play-oriented website when
people die of hunger, daily social injustice,
economical disparities, gentrification,
homelessness and war. To NOT address this means
that you support all this. The ACTUP slogan in
the 1980s was Silence is Death.
13
RepeatLev Manovich text--The database
today is what the novel and cinema were for the
modern age.Its so popular because its a
collection of items that you can view, search and
navigate. But its more than that. The world
with as it presents itself to us is an
encyclopedia of images, texts, and more The
World as Database.Database as anti-narrative,
with examples ranging from homepages (collection
of links), DVDs, CD ROM (ie. of museums), Shoah
(Steven Spielberg Foundation interviews all
Holocaust survivors- digitized video, 42 years of
video interviews recorded to date). reality-gt
media -gt data -gt database  .
14
RepeatInterface(s) and content are
separateYou can pull the same content into
endless numbers of interfaces.This is one
aspect of variability of new media objects
(meaning that they can appear in numerous shapes
and forms)In relational databases you can link
your entries -creating hypernarratives.
15

16

9 project by Mongrel NINE(9) is a
community-based social software project that
provides a new way to collaborate online it
allows 9 groups or 9 individuals to map
text/image/sound archive for life-sharing. The
Mongrel Nine(9) project aims to create an open
software structure within which communities and
individuals can explore and visualize the social
geographies of their environment. The project is
ongoing developing, testing and documenting its
software tools and human processes with which
people can 'map' the invisible social and
emotional factors in their local surroundings
that hold power structures in place. The maps can
reflect personal experiences of social space as
affected by differences such as color, class,
cultural background, gender and sexuality. These
mappings can become instruments for social change
and agents for linkage within and between
individual experiences and diverse cultures. As
a social software project, Nine(9) is directly
born, changed and developed as the result of an
ongoing sociability between users and programmers
in which demands are made on the practices of
coding that exceed their easy fit into
standardized social relations. Nine(9) can most
usefully be understood to work in these terms. It
is a socio-technical pact between users of
certain forms of license, language, culture and
environment. The various forms of its freeness or
openness are being developed as part of the
various rhythms of the life of this software its
production and critical engagement with the
process of permission. In addition to this, Nine
requires new social machines to spawn its codes,
to diffuse and manage its development and
implementation.
17

9 project by Mongrel Nine(9) is a study in
language as Data. Nine(9) uses indexing and word
frequency to examine the stream of textual input
into the Nine archive. Users use these statistics
to set word lists that both represent their
content and determine how their content will link
to other users. Nine(9) is a dynamic analysis of
word use. Nine(9) is a study in self-evident
learning systems The software has 9 groups, each
of which has 9 archives each of which has 9 maps.
Each map has 9 images, 9 texts, 9 sounds. This
simple structure allows for simplicity of
understanding the software-only one number to be
remembered. Nine(9) attempts to flatten
hierarchies of knowledge at the level of
algorithm and information retrieval. Nine(9) uses
Word Frequency to determine the present content
of the archive. Nine(9) uses image as ambiguous
memory, because an image can be seen as both
proposition and pointer to information. Nine(9)
use this tactic to allow the navigation of its
underlying content.
18

9 project by Mongrel