Sky Huvard, 2005 -- Presented by CyboZone

Let Information Be The Architect

Organization and retrieval of data in the era of information overload must overcome the cultural authority governing its authenticity and value.

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Cellular automata has the potential to glide through the abundance of digital data while developing new perspectives for its interpretation.

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Contemporary interaction with information creates reproduction which lacks a unique existence and presence in time and space.

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"On Exactitude in Science . . . In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography."

Suarez Miranda,Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658

Existing organizational systems also rely on reproduction and redundancy that creates more indexes than data contained within.

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The computer age has transformed cultural processes, mutating perceptions of reality into that of a database.

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The inner logic governing a database must maintain its unique presence in time and space - the aura of the database.

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A history of interactions with the database will serve to simultaneously define what is redeemed and highlight what is not.

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Shaping itself for the user, the database evolves throughout time and space from the creative destruction within.

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It becomes possible, then, to reveal entirely new meanings of the data through the distinct focus of a unique interaction.

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Because we all develop in our own order, is it fair to expect anything else from a database?

List of Figures

1. Developed by the Art Information Task Force, funded by the J. Paul Getty Trust, is the Categories for the Description of Works of Art ER Diagram. Uses controlled vocabularies, authorities, and specific formatting for data entry.
2. "Examples of nested patterns created by following the two-dimensional substitution rules shown. Except for the last examples on each row, it is remarkably difficult to recognize the nested structure in these patterns by eye, even with quite careful scrutiny. The two-dimensional pointer-based encoding scheme from page 571 does however manage to recognize the structure in all cases." (Stephen Wolfram)
3. Copy & Paste. Chiste del Día
4. Jorge Luis Borges. Translated by Andrew Hurley
5. Chelovek s kinoapparatom (The Man with the Movie Camera). Dziga Vertov
6. "Patterns obtained by successively laying down circles in such a way that the center of each new circle is as close as possible to the center of the first circle. The extent to which these represent the densest possible packings is not clear, and indeed it is quite possible that in most such actual packings circles of different sizes are just separated into several uniform regions." (Wolfram)
7. Agrippa - A Book of The Dead, William Gibson and Dennis Ashbrough
8. 13 Catherines. Joseph Nechvatal
9. "These pictures show results for a fairly typical sequence of initial conditions where all three bodies interact. (The two bodies at the bottom are initially at rest; the body at the top is given progressively larger rightward velocities.) What generically happens is that one of the bodies escapes from the other two (like t or sometimes t^(2/3)). Often this happens quickly, but sometimes all three bodies show complex and apparently random behavior for quite a while. (The delay before escaping is reminiscent of resonant scattering.)" (Wolfram)
10. "A cellular automaton pattern that takes thousands of steps to die out. (Page 754.)" (Wolfram)

People

• Victoria Vesna
• Sharon Daniel
• Lev Manovich
• Andrew Feenberg
• Herbert Marcuse
• Mieke Bal
• Joseph Nechvatal
• Stephen Wolfram
• Jorge Luis Borges
• Dziga Vertov

Ideas

• The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
• Questioning Technology
• One-Dimensional Man
• Sites & Readings: Database Aesthetics
• Database Aesthetics: Issues of Organization and Category in Online Art
• The Language of New Media
• Folksonomy
• Of Exactitude in Science

Projects

• Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities
• The Digital Cultures Project
• CITRIS Collaborative Gallery Software
• the 13 Catherines
• Categories for the Description of Works of Art
• NKS 2004 Gallery

Books

• The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information, Alan Liu. ISBN 0-226-48699-0 (alternate, search)
• The Language of New Media, Lev Manovich. ISBN 0-262-13374-1 (alternate, search)
• Walter Benjamin: Critical Constellations, Graeme Gilloch. ISBN 0-7456-1008-0 (alternate, search)
• EXHIBITION-ism: Museums and African Art. ISBN 0-945802-16-1 (alternate, search)
• Art and Artifact: The Museum as Medium. ISBN 0-500-23790-5 (alternate, search)
• Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, Mieke Bal. ISBN 0802078060 (alternate, search)
• The Cultural Studies Reader, Simon During. ISBN 0-415-07708-7 (alternate, search)
• A New Kind of Science, Stephen Wolfram. ISBN 1-57955-008-8 (alternate, search)
• Agrippa - A Book of The Dead, William Gibson and Dennis Ashbrough. http://www.antonraubenweiss.com/gibson/gibson0.html

Films

• The Man with the Movie Camera, Dziga Vertov.