Database Logic(s) and Landscape Art
Brett
Stalbaum, C5 corporation
pdf (100 Kb)
Introduction: the logics of database logic
The important question for contemporary information
artists working with geographic information systems is, "How
do we view the landscape according to database logic?"
But before this surprisingly complicated problem can be parsed,
there is a semantic issue regarding the meaning of "database
logic" that must be clarified before we can embark on our
search for an answer. "Database logic" is overloaded.
One signature of the aesthetics of database is multi-layered,
relating to various data modeling techniques and APIs for accessing
and processing data, whereas another signature of "database
logic" lies in relation to the visual, audible and interactive
presentation of a work: interfacial aesthetics. Thus there are
more "database logics" than those that are
directly manifest in the visual, interactive and user interface
related aspects of the information arts. Once past the user
interface, analysis is able to expand to the formal organization
of data, as well as the computational, semiotic, and cultural
behavior that is expressed in the structural coupling of data
to the environment in which it functions. The logistics required
in dealing with the landscape through database logic necessarily
involves the implementation of database logic in addition
to the representation of database logic, and this is
a pivotal issue that touches many of the other issues facing
artists dealing with landscape as data.
It is in the implementation of relational, object-oriented,
object-relational, multidimensional and other database models
where explorations of landscape data and its world might be
expressed, allowed to self-express, or express in collaboration
with human subjects; the user interface is secondary representation
to the structure and organization of data. Indeed, it is not
even clear that the technical organization of data is necessarily
a strong predicate of user interface. This is demonstrated in
the cultural realm of human-machinic interaction by the dogged
reemergence of the command line interface (mostly thanks to
Linux); even as many began to assume that the CLI was dead.
Even the computer operating system formerly known best for its
GUI Puritanism, the MacOS, is now actually a Unix OS called
MacOSX, (it is really BSD [1]
under the GUI covers), that for the first time makes
a shell interface available to Mac users. The fact that database
is often accessed, designed, and managed using both GUIs and
CLIs indicates that the underlying data and various API layers
are not necessarily bound to any particular aesthetic experience
of database at the interface. [2]
This is not to say that there is no coupling between
these layers [3],
nor is it to say that there is no 'database aesthetic' that
is expressed as a visible or interfacial part of our culture.
Rather than drive the analysis of database aesthetics away from
the interface, the intention is to extend aesthetics down into
at least the technical implementation of data, allowing
the inclusion of data, its organization and possibly its
inter-textual or extra-textual behaviors regardless of external
intentionalities and semantics.
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 not clear that landscape as database art is best expressed
through either the command line interface or graphical
user interface in the first instance, (although I would never
deny that it could be expressed in such a way). 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.
Answering these problems of database and landscape requires
a great deal of work, most of which is honestly speculative
at this time, and which can not be secured in this essay. But
the reason to make art (and to write) is to understand, rather
than because one already understands, (exploration not explication),
so I ask the reader to pardon the dust as I construct a bridge
between the precession of models, the semiotic and cultural
context of database, and the formal technical logics of data
that impinge upon the practice of database as landscape art.
If I mistakenly include the Buenaventura River [4]
flowing to the Pacific in my early maps, only at some
later time to discover my initial anticipations evaporate in
the Humboldt Sink, so be it. The Humboldt Sink may be adequately
interesting for reasons other than transport to the Pacific.
It is important to this analysis to reference certain philosophical
notions that impinge upon and inform the cultural logic of late
20th and early 21st century art. These
will be indexed but not detailed except as necessary to drive
this analysis away from certain pitfalls. The first is the tradition
of semiology, particularly the theoretical thread that emerged
from narrative analysis dealing specifically with the aesthetic
consequences of syntagm and paradigm. Another is the precession
of simulacra, or matters of models of the real and their impact
on, or replacement of, the real. Finally, there is the theory
of abstract machines, or immanent models or attractors around
which systems spontaneously organize their material manifestation.
The first is largely influenced by Roland Barthes, the second
derives primarily from Baudrillard, the latter from Deleuze,
and his best reader, Manuel DeLanda. The pitfalls that I want
to be very careful about are the clichés and metaphors that
spin out of the discourse of the postmodern, which have been
favored by artists and intellectuals in the 20th
century [5].
Rather than limit analysis to conceptual models of nomadic ridicule,
deconstruction of the text, copy-left cut and paste, or ironic
criticism of cultural institutions, I instead seek an analysis
that views the precession of models, abstract machines, and
the technical logic of database as aspects of the actual that
should be explored by artists [6]
in the context of landscape.
Surveyor: Precession of models and landscape
The participation of the landscape in human culture is increasingly
understood through Geographic information systems. For example,
the emerging discipline of archeological geophysics uses GIS
data to explore the influence of geology on human political
and economic history. [7]
But the operational inversion of this statement is also
true: political and economic history inflects (and often inflicts)
itself on the landscape. For example geologists and civil engineers
enlist geo-data to help physically reorganize the landscape;
construction, mining, oil drilling, landfill, agriculture, railroads,
urban planning, waterworks, dams and transportation are all
endeavors that now prehend the landscape through the use of
geo-data. The landscape's own data is a player in the systemization
of our decision making. [8]
Geographic information systems, including the C5 Landscape
Database [9]
and related tools, demonstrate precession of the model
through processing data via semantically stable data models,
over which processing yields information that allows the revelation
of knowledge about the landscape which predicts our relation
toward it.
Map of Mt. Diablo, California,
UTM imager module, C5 Landscape database (2002)
The practical outcomes of this knowledge indicate that the
landscape prehends to some degree its own modification by humanity.
This concept seems counter-intuitive, but an example makes it
straightforward. Dams, for example will be constructed in topographies
and geologies that allow them to function as dams.
[10]
Data models lie in some position between a two way conversation
between the cultural and the topographical that lead to actual
modifications of the landscape. In autopoietic terms, the exploration
of relations between topography and culture through informational
interchange is beginning to reveal examples of structural coupling
[11]
- like behavior between them. To grasp this, it is important
to understand that data has simultaneously become a catalyzing
factor in the conversation, not merely an analytical tool for
exploitation. This feedback loop alters the character of the
human relationship to landscape from that of relatively unplanned
domination to a somewhat more sensitive symbiosis. [12]
Data and control systems provide a channel through which
eco-systems are able to express an influence in favor of their
own protection [13].
In addition, the landscape occasionally demands (or acquiesces
to) a new bridge, water diversion, nuclear waste site or freeway
interchange. Thus one of the problems that artists (and possibly
scientists) working with landscape as data must deal with is
the embeddedness of the precession of models in-between the
political and the immanence of data as it is processed into
information. This political dimension to the inquiry deals with
mapping as a cultural production embedded within a set of scientific
descriptors which drive our cultural relationship with the land.
How can we begin to describe the complexities that emerge from
this relationship?
Evidence of the cultural in
landscape data, Memphis, TN.
Data, which is non-controversially real in an ontological sense,
is now a formative influence on the actualization of the landscape
through virtualization in information technology systems.
The notion of virtual in this description is drawn from Deleuze's
schema for describing multiplicities, as discussed by Delanda.
[14]
It does not refer to the interfacial notion of 'virtual
reality', but rather to the actualization of reality through
velocity vector fields (or tendencies to behave) that manifest
themselves as actual (measurable) trajectories of physical systems
as expressed in relational constraints between its vectors.
The trajectories resulting from relative constraints tend to
settle into consistent patterns of interaction with one another.
Observations of velocity vectors and trajectories in actual
systems allow phase portraits describing such systems to be
embedded in simulated manifolds consisting of descriptors of
the vectors and their trajectories. The phase portrait simply
describes the interactions inherent in the actual system. Applied
science utilizes this schema to model physical systems; analyzing
behavior through repeated observations of actual physical systems,
and then using computer models developed through the informatization
of such observations into manifolds to animate vector descriptors
into phase portraits. Through simulated manipulation of descriptors
describing velocity vectors, scientists are able to model natural
systems and predict complex behavior. The United States, for
example, has ceased to physically test nuclear weapons, because
these can be tested virtually with super-computer simulations.
For Delanda and before him Deleuze, virtuality is not merely
a contemporary artifact of computation, but rather identifies
the proximity of concrete attractors, realities which attract
the actualization of systems, and which for Delanda replaces
essences in philosophy. It is specifically because the virtual
is real (or more real than real) that it can be explored computationally,
where for example Plato's ideal forms simply can not be computed.
In other words, virtuality implies a relationship to the actualization
of systems in concrete terms, not transcendental terms. The
concreteness of attractors are demonstrated in "various
long term tendencies of a system… which are recurrent topological
features, which means that different sets of equations, representing
quite different physical systems, may possess a similar distribution
of attractors and hence, similar long-term behavior."
[15]
In more common Deleuzeian terms, attractors are abstract
machines: general abstract processes (such as stratification,
meshworks, blind replicators) that play an embedded role in
the instantiation of a concrete actual. Simulations really
help us study actual systems, including geology, watershed,
landcover, and topography. Thus the virtual is defined in terms
of attractors or actuators of the real, not the imaginary virtual
reality worlds that have been the subject of so many art projects.
Data is thus not unreal; it is a virtual reality
that participates in instantiation. The mechanisms of data that
participate in actualization can be discovered through modes
of experimental exploration in virtual space. We might be tempted
to infer that it is the information, knowledge, (and related
opportunity) that can be mined from modeled data (in relation
to the virtual), which play the catalytic role in the generation
of the real landscape where humanity is involved, and to a large
degree, this has been the case historically. In this view, the
techniques of virtual science allow us to search for predictive
scientific truths that can be rationally manipulated. But of
course, there are perspectives that potentially make this inference
problematic. We could, for example, pose a Marxist-semiotic
analysis; positing that there exists parasitic cultural assumptions
that cleave to (or are expressed in) data models (and thus the
data collected), which are otherwise sincerely generated for
scientific purposes. In other words, do notions of progress,
development, land use, extraction of natural resources and other
cultural or economic desires dictate the manifold, perhaps through
omission of descriptors, based on the 'purpose' that the data
is intentionally collected for? This could explain the subtle
and perhaps even unintentional manipulation of science to either
deny or confirm humanity's influence on global warming, to site
just one well known example.
Alternatively, data's role in the instantiation of the actual
may be a matter of virtual informatic interrelations (or external
relations between data sets), forming their own consensual domains
[16]
that heretofore have not yet been observed as such,
but which potentially inflect the operation of actual systems
via informational transfer between neighboring systems of interrelations.
In other words, data interrelations may themselves be vectors
that influence the trajectory of actual systems. This theory
depends on the idea that data is not only real, but actual,
and capable of actualization. Although it is likely that all
of these issues are all interoperable to some degree, Joel Slayton
hints at C5's orientation by posing the following: "These
are factors of economic and political assessment which infer
that database logic necessarily has to surpass… intentionalities.
Are artists just going to do economic, rainfall and surveillance
models, or does the question shift to other subject-less concerns
of mere informatic relations? If so, what is the semiotic context?"
[17]
Subject-less (or non-semantic) informatic relations
must express some form of semiotic-like behavior if actual (because
actual systems can ultimately be signified, such as imaginary
numbers), but would be difficult to penetrate from either the
examination of their semiosis, (how do we observe a system when
we don't know what questions to ask), and from the perspective
of a language to express that which is after all non-semantic.
"Clarity endlessly plunges into obscurity" [18]
under such analytical circumstances. This is obviously
a highly speculative territory, but if tactics to reveal such
relations of data can be developed, and if they can be generalized,
then we have a new understanding of database [19]
that may account for the two way conversation between
the cultural and the topographical, (or the genetic, the chemical,
the quantum, etc.) C5 enters this terrain in explorative fashion
though the semiotic context of our discipline (as artists),
with landscape and its data as the object of study.
Mountainous: Semiotics, and the precession
of semantic models
To explore the issues of virtuality in a cultural context,
I observe first that the semiotic context culturally (for artists,
not necessarily for subject-less informatic relations) is one
in which the precession of models is related to a supposed semiotic
reversal of syntamatic axis and paradigmatic axis within the
more general cultural logic of database. Roland Barthes (generation
68) demonstrated that symbol systems are capable of taking on
additional layers of meaning as systems of connotation (paradigm)
emerge on top of systems of denotation (syntagm). [20]
Lev Manovich (generation 89) demonstrates that one of
the cultural implications of database is that paradigm (model)
becomes increasingly visible in relation to syntagm, speculating
its eventual replacement as the explicit axis. [21]
The model (name, address, phone, email) moves to the
foreground, while the story of the population of the database
(first sale, 7 billionth customer served), becomes less visible.
I say that this is the "context culturally" because
this axis (in various positions) has been apparent as an aesthetic
issue since the early 20th century. For example,
consider the classic Hollywood style of narrative film editing
(tending toward emphasis of the syntagmatic axis) versus the
paradigmatic montage techniques of Vertov and Eisenstein in
early 20th century cinema. I will raise questions
about this bi-axial cultural model soon enough, but for the
present time we need it to chase out those questions.
This axial semiotic context and its supposed historical shift
toward paradigm are historically simultaneous with the precession
of the model through active digital sign systems. [22]
The virtual is not a result of computation, but rather
the virtual was discovered during a two century period when
the resources making computation and model based exploration
possible were developed, including many mathematical discoveries.
The virtual (call it what you will: attractors, abstract machines)
was discovered using these resources, rather than being created
by them. It would be extremely difficult to argue against the
notion that the late axial shift noted by Manovich (somewhat
simultaneously with the postmodern), is not related to computerization
and informatics; particularly the emergence of database starting
in the 1960's. And Baudrillard, for his part, makes it quite
plain that "the real is produced from miniaturized units,
from matrices, memory banks and command models" [23]
in his discussion of precession. Hence the axial shift
observed in semiotics is very likely bound to precession in
some way through information systems and the discovery of the
virtual. How might we tie these phenomena together?
A preliminary view is that the precession
of models is in fact an intermediary between the technical logics
of database and its expression culturally. For example, the
design of a relational database management system starts with
semantic techniques such as entity relationship modeling (ERM)
in order to build a bridge between the cultural world of the
problem (Customer, Invoice, Order, Part number), and the technical
organization and type of data (such as tables in a RDMS). Still,
the matter of how precession mediates between the interfacial
cultural logic of database and data as technical form is complicated
by the embeddedness of precession in a context where it can
be manifest, simultaneously, as both a cultural mediator and
within the technical logic of database. Thus it seems that in
order to escape a bad patch of tautological quicksand, (precession
mediates between technical form and database culture because
technical form is also precession which mediates database culture),
we need to distinguish between the analytic mechanics
of precession, (where Delanda's reading of Deleuze might be
of help to us), and precession as evaluative cultural analysis.
To some degree, this describes the split between science and
the postmodern, and the analytic tradition and the continental
tradition in philosophy.
Artist/programmer Carmin Karasic gives a brilliant example
of evaluative cultural analysis when she observes that the long
financial recession in the United States in the early 21st
century was preceded by a decline in the stock market, rather
than the decline in the stock market being preceded by the beginning
of a recession. [24]
In this, we see a situation where the complex, distributed,
abstraction [25]
that we refer to as capital markets leads the rest of
the economy in the dance; inflecting other aspects of
economic activity such as labor, production and consumer confidence
more so than reflecting them. Indeed, a casual look at
the general data seems very much to support the thesis. This
is the profound influence of the virtual (in this case,
more in the Baudrillardian sense than the Deleuzian), over the
actual (such as jobs.) Many view this type of analysis as representative
of the triumph of precession, which as we have seen is bound
in some way to the foregrounding of the paradigmatic axis in
aesthetics. However, working with this largely metaphorical
notion of precession, as is the tradition of Baudrillard, seems
inappropriate for the kind of landscape as database practice
C5 is interested in specifically because it is largely metaphorical.
Thus it is as amicable to irony and other distractions of postmodernity
(such as Baudrillard's delightful discussions of Disneyland),
as it is to insightful observations such as Karasic's. It is
hard to get a hook into the actual mechanics of economic history
through such evaluative cultural analysis. Certainly, the provocation
of the example would leave economists of different intellectual
persuasions arguing on both sides of the proposition.
The notion of precession for our purposes as database/landscape
artists is more usefully defined in a narrow technical manner,
if mostly for tactical reasons. Under this view, data and informatics
inflect a powerful influence over what happens because technical
models are precession. Precession is technical form that
mediates culture through database because we can relate data
to everything actual; and "everything is everything that
happens". [26]
For better or worse, this suspends the matter of cultural
analysis, (and a lot of problems with metaphor), postponing
precessive cultural analysis at least until we have a clearer
picture of actual dynamics. Another tactical reason to work
with technical models is that it is to the degree that any speculated
shift toward paradigm is expressed in a technical basis
of data in database logic that there is some space for computer
artists to work as computer artists. The models (manifolds,
vector fields and phase portraits) we discuss in the context
of these tactics are (at least initially [27])
semantically stable, thus we might name the basis of the cultural
shift more specifically: the precession of semantic models,
which allow for calculable processes of deduction to perform
algorithmic prediction based on attractors. We view this as
an enhancement to the use of connotative traits such as qualities
of character, which were formerly the basis of prediction and
decision-making, in both the arts and in the political aspect
of the landscape.
In a fine example of the latter, explorer, poet and the 1856
United States presidential candidate John C. Fremont [28]
explained, "We encamped on the shore, opposite
a very remarkable rock in the lake, which had attracted our
attention for many miles... This striking feature suggested
a name for the lake, and I called it Pyramid Lake."
[29]
Today, decisions regarding 'where' are made very differently
due to the precessive shift: place is evaluated through technical
qualities derived from data, because romantic aesthetic analysis
of character (such as "remarkable"), can not answer
many of the most important questions we have about the landscape
today. [30]
Rather, the task for artists today is to explore why
examples of the sublime [31]
are sublime [32]
by modeling them and revealing more of their complexity
in relation to other systems. This is in addition to examining
the prowess of our human aesthetic sensibilities [33],
which is still interesting; there is no good reason to jettison
the sublime just because it is romantic. Rather, the goal is
to understand the sublime as a likely indicator of (or pointer
to) the presence of attractor(s) which can ultimately be modeled.
Humans are significantly superior to computers in regards to
inferencing; possessing profound abilities of induction as compared
to the computer's profound ability of deduction. Our tact involves
utilizing the participation of people and extremely large sets
of data to enhance and even replace what was once the seemingly
boundless landscape of the 19th century, a landscape
which has become suddenly smaller in the 21st century
[34],
with a boundlessness of data relations to explore.
The precession of semantic models extends even to naming of
place, for example, the UTM [35]
system allows the naming of every square meter on the
surface of the Earth in terms that emphasize not characterization
but calculability. Thus we might infer once again that it is
the calculable, mineable, predictable relations of data that
function as the primary aspects of data that drive the real.
Data and their semantics tend to guide the way they are used,
almost as cultural reflex. Are artists bound to work through
semantic models in a way dictated by the purposes for which
data is collected, such as "economic, rainfall and surveillance?"
Are the strategies of contemporary data processing (data processed
into information begets knowledge) the artistic Zeitgeist of
our time, in much the same manner that the writings of Edmund
Burke [36]
influenced the 19th century romantic style
in the landscape arts during that previous era?
11 286471E 4428277N
The seeming victory of precession and the
axial shift toward the paradigmatic in the regime of active
cultural processes may not be as complete as the tradition of
postmodern aesthetics leads one to believe, because postmodernist
thought may in fact be guilty of excessive focus on emerging
cultural conditions as these make the sometimes slow transition
between novelty and ubiquity. Blinded by novelty in a few dimensions,
our observations of the manifold constituting our contemporary
semiotic network culture may be lacking important vectors. The
semiotic axis may be but two dynamic dimensions/descriptors
of a larger semiotic multiplicity. A manifold of undiscovered
vectors needing semantic description in order to approach a
complete semiotic model may be required to explain our cultural
conditions. Such inquiry might explain how dominantly syntagmatic
systems co-exist and interact beside dominantly paradigmatic
systems. Through this, it might be possible to explain or predict
the instability of the polar axis.
These propositions can not quite be demonstrated
yet, but there are certainly ample indications hinting that
contemporary cultural conditions do not exactly snap to the
axial grid. For example, technologically progressive cultural
assumptions embedded as secondary meanings on top of primary
denotative scientific data can be viewed under the former semiotic
regime of the syntagm, while the use of a database and data
mining to unearth relations amidst large datasets can be viewed
under that of a paradigmatic order through model based processing.
Thus there is at least the appearance of quite possibly interoperable
systems actively functioning in the midst of different semiotic
regimes. An even bigger question mark can be planted in the
Earth regarding subject-less informatic relations. Such relations,
if they exist, of course remain completely uncertain relative
to any axial analysis, because this semiotic context is after
all subject-oriented to begin with. We can assume, and probably
must assume, that precession plays a role here, but again, uncertainty
abounds.
These are unresolved questions best addressed
in practice. This preliminary survey of the issues is the only
map we have right now. Even though the shape of the coastline
may be a little warped, and even though we know only a little
about the terrain to be discovered inland, we can say that we
are confident about the general shape of the problems that face
artists working with database and landscape. It is time to let
the unexpected modify, fill in, even transform that understanding
in practice. It is a common safety practice to leave a note,
or let some friends know, where you are going (in case you do
not come back). The rest of this essay discusses where we are
planning to venture.
Multiplicity of the local: Applications
of database logic in the landscape
Though only a starting point (again, the situation
aesthetically regarding the axial nature of our semiotic context
is not so clear), we can nevertheless posit that the nature
of place undergoes a motor transformation (because calculable
by machines) as the precession of semantic models allows the
topographical, geological, statistical, geophysical-archeological,
and historical relations between different places to be navigated
paradigmatically (the model) instead of syntagmatically (the
narrative). In addition to enhancing scientific endeavor, it
also opens spaces for aesthetic exploration via algorithmic
techniques that are impossible if one is dedicated to romantic
or modernist journeys of exploration of the type that reached
their zenith in Lewis/Clark (or Albert Bierstadt), and Hillary/Norgay
(or Richard Diebenkorn) respectively. An alternative area of
artistic inquiry into place becomes its relation to other place,
even if not through any obvious geographical relationship. It
is even possible that relations discovered may not even be practical
in an exploitative sense, but they would be no less actual relations
simply because they did not yield a new pocket of crude oil
or some such. As a result, aesthetic value changes from that
of the landscape's own value as individual space (either beauty,
desolation, the sublime), and moves toward a relationship with
multiple others. Culture swerves from Nietzsche's Genealogy
of Morals toward Deleuze and Guattari's Geology of Morals.
For example, geologists use geomorphic similarity to classify
the origin and history of similar rocks from different geographic
locations. Such morphological relations emerge through similar
general processes of formation; attractors or abstract machines.
[37]
In the landscape, topologies are also expressed through
influences of their emergence through various general processes,
(such as stratification, meshworks, replication, and perhaps
autopoiesis given what we suspect about the role of data in
the landscape), all of which can be modeled and searched. This
makes possible the search for an almost limitless variety of
'other' relations, other shores, other paths, other mountains,
and other topographical others that are manifest because their
formation was organized around similar topographic and geologic
attractors. Database becomes a both a context and a tool for
exploring the relations between landscapes from arbitrary locals.
This alone is adequate grounds for exploration and activity.
C5 is interested in more speculative territories as well, such
as the issue of how database might serve as a context for exposing
unobserved attractors and behaviors; no less than the subject-less
informatic relations that may suffice as solutions to questions
we have not yet formed.
Perhaps the clearest early example of a paradigmatic influence
related to GIS can be found in the Degree Confluence Project
[38],
which is perhaps surprisingly not an artist driven project,
though it is more like an artwork than many artist driven projects.
[39]
By identifying points (the confluences of integral latitudes
and longitudes), and encouraging people to use GPS devices to
find these points on the earth, narrative (the story of getting
there) emerges as secondary to the model (the arbitrary choice
of Latitude/Longitude over the Universal Transverse Mercator
system for mapping locations on the Earth). The mapping model,
even if in a trivial manner, becomes the primary and very compelling
[40]
agent of the performance. The narratives come after
the (re)discovery of place through the abstraction of the map,
rather than the exploration of place in order to create the
map itself.
The narratives produced by the Degree Confluence
are database alternatives to romantic and modernist narrative,
instantiated as they are by actual database logic. The confluences
in this case are even rounded to an integer value, which may
only be a matter of conceptual convenience, and of course the
convenience of those reading the intersections of lines on their
maps. But it is tempting also to think of it as a specific issue
of model and database culture: the corresponding field in the
table can be specified as the type SMALLINT to save disk space.
(No floating point to store.) The choices made in the reordering
of narrative are no longer at issue for the participants, or
for the creators of the work. The map is in command here. The
only choices in evidence are tactical ones: it is all about
getting yourself to a point that was chosen for you by the model.
This would not be conceivable without some instability in the
semiotic axis, or precession of semantic models. Failure to
explore such possibilities on the part of contemporary artists
working with landscape would amount to artistic malpractice.
To ignore the contemporary database logics and their impact
on aesthetic developments in culture at large is akin to riding
a horse to work. In spite of the notion that the model supercedes
the landscape itself through precession (Baudrillard's more
extreme cultural evaluation of precession), it turns out that
we face not the landscape's disappearance before its model,
as much as its conceptual reorganization philosophically under
concepts inherent to technological societies of the 21st
century, where it becomes obvious that data is an actuator of
the landscape. Artists should be among the first to recognize
this and work with this shift.
Fordable: The body and place in GIS practice
The confluence of the body with place, (and their data), is
the final aspect of C5's research into landscape. Treating the
body and its position relative to a paradigmatic definition
of place and its meaning provides a much needed alternative
practice, especially as Generation Flash [41]
marvelously rediscovers the brisling downtown area of
the hypertextual arts. Just as informatics change the nature
of place, it changes the nature of being in place, of moving
through place, and of collaboration in place. [42]
These in turn inform the moribund theoretical associations
of 'network' as physical communications infrastructures, tangles
of packets moving over them, communications/collaboration/commerce,
animation/browser/server. It instead provides a context (though
GIS is only one of many possible antidotes), to reveal abstract
machineries to be explored via a network theory in an expanded
field, using the contemporary tools of computation and network,
but without being blockaded by an analysis of the technical
foundations and social manifestations of merely one kind of
network: the internet. The schema for exploring these issues
is, for C5, the implementation of relational systems in which
the landscape is allowed to have its say in any imaging (including
nature photography, drawing, painting), performance art (the
body and the landscape), land art (the modification of the landscape),
and database art (the management of geo data and processing),
that emerge in collaboration with all involved agents: artists/audience/parasite,
as well as the land itself. Who knows, maybe even some traditional
net.art will emerge from this activity.
There are unexplored spaces on the surface of the earth in
the sense that there are unexplored relations of landscape that
can be revealed through its data. Technical barriers, such as
the politics of data collection and acquisition, numerous, inscrutable
[43]
and/or inconsistent data formats, and a lack of available
software for processing the landscape outside of a frame of
assumptions [44]
placed on GIS software by cartographers, geologists,
hydrologists, planners and oil companies, must be overcome for
artists to work with geo data in any other manner than as data
visualization, or ironically conceptual in the postmodern sense.
New terminologies for landscape (aesthetic and technical) are
required to expose the spaces between spaces that that may be
occupied. C5 is not the first art endeavor to build its own
GIS codebases, and this is not at all unrelated to the fact
that the work that impresses us most with its conceptual richness
is that by artists who create much of their own software
[45],
rather than to make use of packaged GIS solutions. We need our
own tools, designed with the endeavor of mining conceptual richness
from the materials of the Earth as the primary specification,
not the extraction of natural resources. To do so, we must select
the manifolds for our experiments from our observation of the
landscape as artists, in addition to the obvious: integrating
the observations of science in art works. Rather than place
ourselves into the landscape by imposing on it, we seek collaborative
interactions with it in a manner mediated by its data and its
ontology.
Another technical issue is how to populate
the manifold with appropriate velocity vectors in order to create
a portrait of the phase space that may identify regions of attraction.
To put it bluntly, we can't wait for mountains to erode or explode
so we can model relations in a dynamic landscape. In order to
twiddle the degrees of freedom in a modeled system in order
to predict, we have to have good initial observations of the
system in motion. But it is difficult to get dynamic models
of the landscape given geological time scales. (This is why
earthquakes are hard to predict, there is just not enough historical
data to get the best predictive model.) Most of the available
data about the landscape is a static temporal snapshot of the
landscape. One common technique for exploring such static data
is to add arbitrary vectors to the manifold, and then animate
them under the constraints provided to them by the initial data
set, allowing analysis of inter-relations, and interpolation
of aspects of the system's phase portrait to be revealed through
interaction with related, or even speculative, vectors. (For
example, you can reveal past topographies in order to speculate
about the differing climatic dynamics of past landscapes through
adding erosion models and predictions about plate tectonics
to the analysis.) For C5, the behavior of the body in the landscape
is an obvious vector for exploration in this regard, both for
reasons of art history, and because our collaborative process
as artists already involves meeting, training and performing
experiments in the outdoors.
This is the nature of informated eco-data-art
that we have laid out for ourselves. We suspect that along the
way there will emerge aesthetic, conceptual, algorithmic, and
physical embodiments that will demonstrate an alternative aesthetic
practice for data Marco Polos, data Lewis and Clarks, and data
Micheal Heizers. Without doubt, there will also be data George
Mallorys, data Donner parties, and data Robert Smithsons. Both
glory and tragedy (often in simultaneity) are inherent aspects
of exploration. These are to be expected in a data frontier
so vast and relatively unexplored.
Endnote
This essay was not written, but rewritten
many times. Valuable editorial work was contributed by Geri
Wittig, without whom I do not believe I could call any of my
texts writing. Also, commentary on various drafts from Anne-Marie
Schleiner and Joel Slayton were immensely helpful, as well discussion
with Lisa Jevbratt, Jack Toolin, and Carmin Karasic, on various
aspects of the sublime and precession. Thank you to Steve Durie
for the Memphis image, to Bruce Gardner for GPS tutorials and
training, and Matt Mays for forwarding many related URLs, all
of which helped me get these ideas into place.
