Database Logic(s) and Landscape Art
Brett Stalbaum

Thus for artists working with landscape data, there are aesthetic correlates to the original question involving the strategic and tactical approaches that are necessary for dealing with the inherent uncertainty of mined/revealed relations amidst (or between) extremely large sets of geo-data organized logically and discretely, particularly in consideration of data with a formal basis in relational or multidimensional algebra. [...] It is possible, and perhaps even likely, that computer artists working with landscape and database might avoid any computer mediated interface to their production altogether. There are other questions which I will treat as well, such as how the nature and conceptions of place are altered by database, and how the nature of being in place (the role of the narrative in place), is similarly altered.

Processual Media Theory and the Art of Day Trading
Ned Rossiter

The key problem of an empirics of new media aesthetics resides in its failure, in a number of instances, to understand that the aesthetics of artworks, software applications and technologies are conditioned by social relations as well as the theoretical paradigms through which analysis proceeds. Technology [...] is found in the processual dimension of articulation, where the media is but one contingent element that undergoes transformation upon every re-articulation. This presents a challenge to the empirical turn in net studies [...]. Empirical approaches to the net [...] need to work in a reflexive mode that is constantly aware of the conditions attached to funded research, to critique them, to describe the institutional cultures that shape the emergent third paradigm of net studies, and to see the seemingly secure ground of any empirical moment as something which is always interpenetrating with something else.

As Logic of Assembly
Eric Deis

Assembly is the fundamental logic of post-industrial and industrial society, whether particular elements are manually assembled by a human author in a fixed sequence or automatically assembled in infinite arrangements by a programmatic software application; the process and consequence is of assembly. Digital Media enhances and reinforces the dominant social logic of assembly from the basic level of assembling Bits of data in order to execute rudimentary electronic commands, to assembling samples of contemporary culture to form a new and unique voice. The process of assembly is freed of virtually any limitations through digital media's ability to encoding discrete elements numerically, which can then be infinitely copied; distributed, arranged, and manipulated.

Network 404
Armin Medosch

I must admit that I find it incredibly difficult to write about networks. I started out by trying to define what a network is, by spelling out, point by point, what are the inherent qualities of networks and how this might relate to art in general and to the work of the artists in this show. But soon I found out that this gave me writers block. Over the past few decades and especially at the start of the internet boom so much has been written about networks, that the ideas have somehow exhausted themselves. Everybody knows the buzzwords by now, I guess. We have been told again and again that networks are de-centralized, bottom-up, hierarchy shattering entities. We have heard about rhizomes, about micro-politics, about self-organisation. Almost magic qualities have been ascribed to networks.

Studying world society
Keith Hart

The truth of social experience is always local, but we need to extend ourselves to grasp what kind of world society we live in. Such a global society is constituted by power relations, but the bridge to an understanding of our common humanity is moral. Morality is the ability to make personal judgements about the good and bad behaviour of people, including ourselves. Anthropology ought to be a means of helping us to do that more effectively. There is no guarantee that people in the future will want to employ experts on the human condition trading under a five-syllable word of Greek origin. But if they do, I hope they will ask anthropologists to make world society personally meaningful for their students and the public.