Bio

Too often we measure everything and understand nothing.

Things should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler.

Man is a senseless coincidence who circles a sun like a piece of intergalactic driftwood for a fraction of a cosmic second, desperately struggling to make sense of the nonsense between birth and death.

Industry expanded quickly. The happily prospering businessman needed  a vast number of mechanics, engineers, and supervisors to fulfill the profit requirements of an economic strategy which served exclusively the demands of mass-production prosperity. The common denominator was quick specialization, without any consideration for biological fundamentals. Vocational schools were founded for the required specialists. Fields of production were specialized and segregated from each other in the hope that the output would be greater if they were not distracted by manifold interests. Creative abilities, concentrated on limited problems, produced stunning results, expanding the boundaries of the capitalistic economy.

The wheels of industry turned fast and prompted a clear division of all labor, neglecting everything but these divided functions. All former responsibility and pride of the craftsman in the wholeness of a  product was now eliminated. Participation in the mass-production process was limited to the execution of a small detail. As the laborer was deprived of the incentive and assurance of working for a creative result dependent upon his abilities for completion, the vital fluid which, as in a battery, carries the current from one unit to the other, evaporated. He became inanimate, working in the maze of tunnels and gangways of the specialized labyrinths.

With growing industrial opportunities the entire educational system attained a vocational aspect. Schools lost sight of their best potential quality: universality. They lost their sense of synthesis to the extent of a complete separation of the various types of experience. On the other hand “prosperity” increased, and with it the temptation to enlarge profits. Everyone seemed satisfied. Production figures and balance sheets “spoke for themselves,” being sufficient justification of training for profit.

My smaller, more specific agenda here is to address a moral eccentricity that per- vades American “high architecture,” the ABC principle—ABC standing, in this case, for “Anything But Commercial.” This principle holds that a really serious, well-connected, metaphysically sound architect in the early 21st century will work for any government, however repressive; any corporation, however predatory; and any private client, however reprehensible, rather than just design a department store.

Institutional architecture is about walls and control, about keeping out time and change, aliens and foreigners. Commercial architecture is about no walls, about that eight-foot space of human interaction that encloses the planet.

… the only explanation I have ever been given for this pedagogical deficit was offered to me by an architecture professor who explained that professors were bound to be commercially disinterested. Leaving aside the fact that architecture professors are not commercially disinterested, I must note that commercial disinterest applies to making money. It doesn’t mean that you’re not supposed to be interested in commerce itself or its products. As any economist can tell you, academic life provides an ideal platform from which you might exercise an interest in and influence on the commercial world without the taint of self-interest.

…I really think it is dangerous to equate the wish or the process or the job description with the act because, in truth, there are no artists, no architects, and no men of letters. There is only art, architecture, literature, and a lot of hapless, confused people trying to make objects or texts that will someday be recognized as art or architecture or literature by the citizens who make those decisions well after the fact. It is not architecture because an architect made it. It is not art because an artist made it. It is not literature because a writer wrote it. Architecture is the consequence of a building having been made and subsequently valorized. It is not a privilege of the title, and the whole idea of accepting the mantle in advance of the act mitigates ambition and cheapens our endeavors.

All this Utopian romance has returned to us, I think, because contingency and dynamic systems are hard to teach and heartless, and as a consequence, practice in its presentness is dead. The flowering of American culture in the ’50s and ’60s withered as the present was transformed into a damaged site that we would fix tomorrow, or maybe next week. And since this fix was perpetually deferred, the future, as imagined by a coercive bureaucracy, took precedence. And it’s hard to work while you’re waiting for Utopia, because optimism and joy are verboten. They are, after all, attributes of the imperfect present and not the perfect future. They are manifestations of a presumption that the future can be handicapped like any other bet. Real optimism, in fact, doesn’t even require that you win your bet. One’s position today is empowered by not being governed by an implacable future. If we all drown tomorrow when a giant tsunami covers Cambridge, today will be none the worse.

So we have Utopia back, but not, I must note, a dynamic Utopia. We have a kind of suburban, Pre-Raphaelite utopia that is little more than pessimistic nostalgia for a failed idea. The surest sign of this is that there are no new utopias There are socialist Utopias, Marxist Utopias, and a selection of faith-based Neverlands, all of which are showing their age, and all of which imagine the future as a world run by large, central institutions. So if we are preparing our students for this future and we are Marxist Utopians or theocratic Jesus freaks, we will teach them to make institutional architecture. That is the normal thing to do. The courthouses, churches, art museums, and Kunsthalles— we will teach them to build all these so they will be ready when the revolution comes. I, however, am betting on a different future.

What I see is an ongoing collaboration and antagonism between the imperatives of institutional and commercial culture. What I hope for is that neither side wins. What I wish for is that practitioners of architecture will learn from the distinct attributes of the corral and the souk. What I fear is that the “post-critical” will throw out the baby with the bathwater, that it will become the post-theoretical and the post-intellectual. If this happens, we are lost. We are mere academics and mere businessmen, and there will be no reason henceforth to call anything architecture again.

In moving through real, “sensorial,” space we may touch immediately near objects. Distant objects in real space are “touched” in the mind (we say the mind “reaches out”). The manner, therefore, in which we make our mental approach to a distant object of attention is styled through analogy with, and expectation of, the bodily experience of near objects. 

Kinesthetic analogy then, an understanding in terms of body, is constant to our reception of perceptual experience, which shifts freely between sensorial and psychological data in the life-world “tangled, muddy, and perplexed,” which precedes the ordering of experience.

Schematically and in terms of discrimination, any path of consciousness through time might be represented as a meander. Attention to objects “out there” in the material world is constantly subverted by the demands of memory. Willful concentration is constantly dissolving into involuntary association. Even beyond familiar types of conscious association there are more subversive mechanisms at work: “. . . we now have direct evidence that signals become distributed within the input system. What we see . . . is not a pure and simple coding of the light patterns that are focused on the retina. Somewhere between the retina and the visual cortex the inflowing signals are modified to provide information that is already linked to a learned response. . . . Evidently what reaches the visual cortex is evoked by the external world but is hardly a direct or simple replica of it.”

Each day we face the intractability of materials that have outstayed their welcome. Many recent attitudes to materials in art are based in an emerging awareness of the interdependence of all substances within the ecosystem of earth. The artist is apt to see himself not as a creator of new material forms but rather as a coordinator of existing forms, and may therefore choose to subtract materials from the environment. As art is being seen increasingly in terms of behavior so materials are being seen in terms simply of quantity rather than of quality.

The identification of art relies upon the recognition of cues that signal that the type of behavior termed aesthetic appreciation is to be adopted. These cues help form a context that reveals the art-object.

Perception is a continuum, a precipitation of event fragments decaying in time, above all a process.

To focus, like this, upon preobjective experience is to be aware of movement, and attention to motion reveals the ephemeral, emphasizes the inconstant: “The invariant component in a transformation carries information about an object and the variant component carries other information, for example, about the relation of the perceiver to the object. When an observer attends to certain invariants he perceives objects; when he attends to certain variants he has sensations.”

Permanence is revealed as being a relationship and not an attribute. Vertical structuring, based in hermetic, historically given concepts of art and its cultural role, has given way to a laterally proliferating complex of activities that are united only in their common definition as products of artistic behavior. This situation in art is the corollary of a general reduction in the credibility of institutions and many find much recent art implicitly political.

It seems rather less likely that the new work will result in the overthrow of the economy than that it will find a new relationship with it; one based, perhaps, in the assumption that art is justified as an activity and not merely as a means of providing supplementary evidence of pecuniary reputability. As George Brecht observed, we are used to judging a work by its suitability for the apparatus. Perhaps it is time to judge the apparatus by its suitability for the work.

Works may be proposed in which materials are deployed and shifted in space in order to create compressions and rarefactions in time. Such a work would be perceived in the “extended present” within which we appreciate music. In this state of awareness the distinction between interior and exterior times, between subject and object, is eroded.

From Introduction

Western metaphysics has traditionally considered the senses of touch, smell, and taste inferior and mere bodily. Also phenomenology has from the beginning held vision to be the paradigm of perception and generally neglected touch, smell, and taste even more. Finally, as a metaphysically rooted discipline, classical aesthetics has denied the artistic potential of these three senses and banished their experiences into the realm of the merely pleasant sensations. With few exceptions (…) philosophical aesthetics has remained true to the theory of artistic and non-artistic senses.

From Aspects of the Haptic, Olfactory, and Gustatory Experience 

The experiencing subject herself seems paradoxical: the patina–designating the traces on the surface of a repeatedly touched object–is both anonymous yet utterly personal insofar as it involves fingerprints, which are unique. A similar paradox underlies one’s own bodily smell. 

These senses are essentially discursive, i.e., their representations remain until the end fragmentary and open-ended. The experience proves to have quasi-paradoxical features: On the one hand, representations of haptic qualities, smells, and flavours cannot be produced sheerly voluntarily. (For example, if we want to evoke a perfume, we cannot rely only on our interior remembrance of it, but have to apprehend an actual stimulus, we have to feel it again.) On the other hand, the olfactory and gustatory memories are very persistent and can sometimes last an entire life.

The static subject-object opposition (…) is replaced by a reciprocal and dynamic neighbourhood (…). The subject becomes part of its object, which surrounds and gives itself to the subject (…) as an embracing medium; briefly, the world becomes environment (Um(-)welt).6 The modern concept of freedom, understood as a negative autonomy, that is, as an isolating in-dependence of the subject from the world, is replaced here by freedom as a dangerous, yet positive openness to the world. This primordial and an-archic openness of the ego, prior to any concrete experience, testifies to the deep connaturality between me and the surrounding things and, instead of hindering the subject, enriches it. I am no longer free from the world, but free for an accord (…) with it, the subject solitaire becomes solidaire with her environment. Subject and object share the same nature and are interdependent.7 This connaturality of the subject and her object or the subject’s embeddedness in a phenomenal field ceases to be a hindrance, but, on the contrary, proves to be a necessary condition for the subject’s self-fulfillment.  

Not least, the phenomenology of  touch, smell, and taste should be a topological theory, i.e., an experiencing thinking (…), that goes through (…) its object, instead of re-presenting it(…) Compared with the classical phenomenological concept of horizon, the intuitive origins of which in the visual experience certify the priority of the sight in Husserl’s theory of perception, the map covers actually the experience of all the senses, from the visual landscape and the “soundscapes” to the “smellscapes,” regional cuisines, the tactile relief maps caressed by the blind and lovers, and the body itself as our carte d’identité.

Already the incompleteness of the haptic, olfactory, and gustatory representations suggests the importance of time in the experience of these senses. The memory of haptic qualities, odors, and flavors is mostly non-verbal and diffuse, imbued with affective impressions and synaesthesias. We recollect odors and flavors spontaneously and involuntarily, as a blissful kairós, or only at the end of an often long and painful process of deliberate search.

In comparison with the terminology employed for sight and even for hearing, discourse about the haptic, olfactory, and gustatory experiences and their qualities is quite poor and often reaches the boundaries of the language (ineffability). Frequently, qualities of these last senses can be named only by borrowing words and expressions from other senses (a “sweet” smell, a “sharp” taste, etc.), by referring to the material source of the sensation or by making comparisons (“it feels/smells/tastes like…”). 

Moreover, most modern Western languages make no distinction between the transitive and intransitive use of a verb of smelling or tasting (“to smell/taste something,” but also “something smells/tastes”) and therefore between deliberate and non-deliberate acts and processes concerning these senses.

From Tasks of an Aesthetics of the “Lower” Senses 

Nevertheless, one cannot ignore the specific difficulties in producing, presenting, and theorizing about works of art and artistic activities based on touch, smell, and taste. For example, the subject’s vulnerability, the frequent contamination of these senses with the erotic and synaesthesia, which is often unavoidable in the description of the tactile, odorous, and gustatory properties, have at least an inhibiting effect on the aesthetic apprehension and evaluation. In addition to this, the essential vital and social functions of these three senses and their dependence on the cultural and symbolic system of a society make the border between aesthetic and non-aesthetic phenomena relative and fluid and require an interdisciplinary approach (…)

The possibility of producing, conserving, and “exhibiting” works of art addressed exclusively to touch, smell, or taste is to be investigated separately. Hegel already objected to admitting that there are art forms corresponding to touch, smell, and/or taste, because their physical support is ephemeral: a meal is consumed as well as the fragrance we inhale; they leave no traces and, therefore, cannot be repeatedly apprehended by different perceivers (the well-known Kantian condition of aesthetic appreciation).

Moreover, aesthetics should also include the sensorial deprivations. In the first place, the experience of a blind person, seldom taken into consideration even now in the philosophy and psychology, undermines both the primacy of the seeing subject in aesthetics and the fiction of a pure aesthetic conscience. 

The fundamental values of an aesthetics of touch, smell, and taste cannot be “beautiful” and “ugly” anymore, which are still deeply shaped by their visual origin, but “attractive” and “distractive” (…). To be attracted or distracted by something also allows a topological interpretation, as centripetal and centrifugal vectors in a field of forces, in which the human subject interacts with the environment.

There might also be specific values to the senses, such as the patina and the affective atmosphere; these have their origins in the tactile and olfactory experience, but, taken in a metaphorical sense, can be also generalised for all arts. Besides, because the patina materialises, i.e., makes visible, a repeated touch over a long interval of time, it encodes an own story of the object and therefore implies temporality and narrativity. 

Think about the strangeness of today’s situation. Thirty, forty years ago, we were still debating about what the future will be: communist, fascist, capitalist, whatever. Today, nobody even debates these issues. We all silently accept global capitalism is here to stay. On the other hand, we are obsessed with cosmic catastrophes: the whole life on earth disintegrating, because of some virus, because of an asteroid hitting the earth, and so on. So the paradox is, that it’s much easier to imagine the end of all life on earth than a much more modest radical change in capitalism.

There is a popular, widespread belief that computers can do only what they are programmed to do. This false belief is based on a confusion between form and content. A rigid grammar need not make for precision in describing processes. The programmer must be very precise in following the computer grammar, but the content he wants to be expressed remains free. The grammar is rigid because of the programmer who uses it, not because of the computer.

The fallacy under discussion is the widespread superstition that we can’t write a computer program to do something unless one has an extremely clear, precise formulation of what is to be done, and exactly how to do it. This superstition is propagated at least as much by scientists—and even by “computer scientists”—as by humanists.

From Logic and Consistency

If applicable at all to the problem‑solving question, Godel’s theorem applies strictly only to perfectly self‑consistent logical systems. People are not this consistent, and there is no reason whatever why we should feel constrained to build our machines along such lines.

From (2) A PROGRAM AS A COURT OF LAW

In short, once past the beginner level, programmers do not simply write ’sequences of instructions’. Instead, they write for the individuals of little societies or processes. For try as we may, we rarely can fully envision, in advance, all the details of their interactions. For that, after all, is why we need computers.

From (3) A PROGRAM AS A COLLECTION OF STATEMENTS OF ADVICE

The great illusion shared not only by all terrified humanists but also by most computer “experts,” that programming is an inherently precise and rigid medium of expression, is based on an elementary confusion between form and content. If poets were required to write in units of fourteen lines, it wouldn’t make them more precise; if composers had to use all twelve tones, it wouldn’t constrain the overall forms; if designers had to use only fourth order surfaces no ‑one would notice it much! It is humorous, then, to find such unanimity about how the rather stiff grammar of (the older) programming language makes for precision in describing processes.

It’s perfectly true that you have to be very precise in your computer grammar (syntax) to get your program to run at all. (…) But it’s perfectly false that this makes you have a precise idea of what your program will do.

When a program grows in power by an evolution of partially‑understood patches and fixes, the programmer begins to lose track of internal details and can no longer predict what will happen—and begins to hope instead of know, watching the program as though it were an individual of unpredictable behavior.

From LATITUDE OF EXPRESSION AND SPECIFICITY OF IDEAS

To take advantage of the unsurpassed flexibility of this medium requires tremendous skill‑technical, intellectual, and esthetic.

To constrain the behavior of a program precisely to a range may be very hard, just as a writer will need some skill to express just a certain degree of ambiguity. A computer is like a violin. You can imagine a novice trying first a phonograph and then a violin. The latter, he says, sounds terrible. That is the argument we have heard from our humanists and most of our computer scientists. Computer programs are good, they say, for particular purposes, but they aren’t flexible. Neither is a violin, or a typewriter, until you learn how to use it.

From 1.1. Data vs. Information

…we can begin with a notion of data from empirical science, as a set of measurements extracted from the flux of the real. In themselves, such measurements are abstract, blank, meaningless. Only when organised and contextualised by an observer does this data yield information, a message or meaning. The concepts are converse, two sides of the same thing: data is the raw material of information, its substrate; information itself. In this context it is not surprising that new media art has, is the meaning derived from data in a particular context.

From 2. Indexical Data: We Feel Fine and the Dumpster

These are critiques of the automated analysis that the works use; but even if the analyses were perfect, the more fundamental representational issue remains. These works rely on a long chain of signification: (reality); blog; data harvesting; data analysis; visualisation; interface. Yet they maintain a strangely naive sense of unmediated presentation.

These works construct a notion of data — of its capacities, qualities, and significance — in the ways that they use it. Data here is first of all indexical of reality. Yet it is also found, or to put it another way, given. These works gather existing data from the network, drawing together thousands of elements that are already, unproblematically, “out there”. This reinforces the sense of collapsed indexicality; these data points have causes (authors) of their own that in some sense guarantee their connection to reality, or at least defer the question of that connection. Data’s creation — in the sense of making a measurement, framing and abstracting something from the flux of the real — is left out.

From 3. Alex Dragulescu: Abject Data

Spam is both a literal and figurative resource here: it is a cultural and a digital dataset. It embodies the failures (or perhaps the cost) of frictionless connectivity and techno-libertarian ideals.

Structure as junk is the darker alternative: that what we appreciate as order, form, and coherence is not only ubiquitous and immanent, but mundane, valueless, empty.

Taken together, Spam Plants and Spam Architecture evoke a sense of data as both structurally rich and substantially, vertiginously empty. In this figuration data is an abstract set of potentials, an array of values waiting to be mapped. A dataset feeds a process, that produces an artefact; the process doesn’t care what the dataset is, or was; whatever it was, now it’s just input: the process (the map) reconfigures the dataset completely, arbitrarily, rewrites it not by altering values but by reprogramming them, altering their potential. The process takes the data as whatever it wants (a wall, a shard, a petal, the difference between this petal and the last), irrespective of what it once was (a word, number, number of characters in a word, difference between this word and the last). Anything is anything.

From 4. Lisa Jevbratt : Data Material

Yet Jevbratt’s work is quite unlike conventional information visualisation: like Dragulescu’s work it is anti-information, in the sense of information as a formed message. Rather than transform data into information, Jevbratt transduces one form of data into another — symbolic or logical into visual.

Yet this textural quality also leads back to the inevitable choices involved in mapping data. In IIL and 1:1, one extrinsic structure dominates, to the extent that patterns in the data are literally wrapped around it. The structure is the rectilinear picture plane, a central obsession of twentieth century visual art and a given in digital media culture. (…) Jevbratt’s picture plane mapping is not based on an information visualisation rationale. It is a cultural structure, highly functional information in itself. As the artist says, it connects these works with a whole tradition, it literally frames the data and offers it up to be read in a particular way, as an abstract “picture” (rather than a graph) and also as an artwork. Of course this mapping does “impose its structure,” but that imposition only underlines the functional differences between art and data visualisation.

From 5. Borevitz and Salavon: Anti-Content and the Artist’s Squint

Data practice here is a kind of artist’s squint. This technique is used in painting and drawing as a kind of perceptual abstraction: a way of attenuating, and abstracting, visual information. Squinting blurs detail, so that recognisable objects are abstracted into visual forms: shape, tone, line. The artist’s squint overturns visual information in order to access its “raw data,” before transcribing that data onto paper or canvas. Ironically the aim here is most often realism, the accurate transcription of visual data. To see “reality”, discard information and observe data.

From 6. Data Immanence, Data Agency

Data art’s resistance to information is not unique. Underdetermination is a contemporary artistic staple; much recent visual art works to defamiliarise the cultural vernacular of images and objects, undermining their known “information” in order to make them available anew, as data.

If Digg offers a crude transcendence (top ten) approach to data excess, data art moves in the other direction, towards the many rather than the few. It turns towards immersion and sensation; it emphasises openness and intuition, rather than the extraction of value or meaning. Most of all it confronts us with immanence itself, a multiplicity of relations; with structure as potential, latent, and emergent, not given and named. This stance is in turn a kind of self-referential affirmation of the networked society.

… these artists also provide models of what might be called data agency: more than browsing and navigating — being subject to the data flows — data agents munge, analyse, map and display.context. (…) abstractions. This propagation of data agency is now well underway, supplemented by the data feed ethos of Web 2.0 culture; a growing culture of data practice is evident in communities around the net.

From 7. Data Figures and Critiques

As much as this work pursues data, it cannot escape information. The data is unreachable in itself, always inflected, at the very least, by its particular, concrete manifestation, no matter how plain. These artists seek to turn the data over to us to explore; yet it arrives already shaped, metaphorically primed, conditioned by the processes that created it, informed by the contexts and genres of its presentation.

This is not to say that data art should be somehow more pure or faithful to its datasets, only that it should embrace, and acknowledge, its impurity. Information leaks in, however slight the artist’s intervention; even (or especially) cultural defaults, like the rectangular picture plane of Jevbratt’s visualisations, shape our interpretation of the work in ways that are extraneous to the data.

A related problem is the sense of data as pre-existing or given. The prominence of networked data, and the increasing availability of data from social web services, contribute to a sense that data has an independent being and existence. Because it comes from somewhere else, typically in real time, its creation is abstracted: it is naturalised. Yet data always comes from somewhere…

This severing of data from its creation leads to two related figures. The first is a notion of data as matter or stuff.(…) The second is a sense of data as concrete and objective, rather than contingent and relational.

Agre’s proposal also addresses a third concern, which is the tendency towards data mysticism. Data here becomes a reservoir of potential, a field of the unknown and emergent. Again it seems self-sufficient, rather than part of a wider set of processes; it also slides away from discourse and critique, which are too prosaic to gain any traction.

Does data art become simply an aestheticised (and perhaps functionally impaired) form of scientific data visualisation?

Manovich suggests that one of the roles of data art is to reflect on data subjectivity; I would go further and say that data art is involved in the construction of that subjectivity. It involves a practical exploration of data’s potential uses and meanings; it literally offers us images, figures, for data itself. It pulls us away from information, from the well-formed messages that dominate our experience of digital media. By directing us instead towards data, it opens spaces for potential, for the distributed reconstruction of information. Yet in the process it inevitably encodes its own specific metadata — data about data — that can be read out through the artists’ processes, as this paper has demonstrated. This metadata must in turn inform us data subjects, if we are to move past immersion and navigation to a more critical, and active agency.