Re: nettime Landscape Painting of the Information Age
John Haber has just come out with an essay on representation of data as 'digital landscapes' that thinks through some interesting complexitie - http://www.haberarts.com/cyborg.htm#diaries He asks about the 'truth' in data representation and discusses narrative and memory in this context. following through a discourse on Carrizo-Parkfield Diaries, Casey Reas, Sol LeWitt, and Kysa Johnson. Every trace attests to an absence, the presence that left its impression in memory. Database-driven art, too, attests to dissociation and loss. Like a mask, it becomes a repository of signs = unmoored from their source, now in the disorienting setting of a flat = panel and a hidden central processor. Like documentary photography, it can numb by sheer repetition, now at a lightning pace. Like painting, = it promises a higher reality, but now in the virtual space of science-fiction scenarios. Like all of these, it creates an architecture of the past, even when it most claims to authenticate the present. =A0=09 The film in question is SALT , online at http://www.christinamcphee.net/slipcity/texts/salt.html Christina McPhee http://christinamcphee.net On Saturday, May 21, 2005, at 02:20 AM, nettime-l-digest wrote: nettime-l-digestSaturday, May 21 2005Volume 01 : Number 1590 ... # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: nettime Landscape Painting of the Information Age
The only artist, as far as I know, who literally creates landscape painting of the information age is Wolfgang Staehle. Herr Ding grumbled something in German when he read this then went out to stand on a rocky shore contemplating the sublime. Or maybe he just went to get coffee. He creates, to use Flusser's term, technical images -- surfaces that are dependent on linear text. While they are technically sophisticated that isn't the first thing you notice about them and I'm sure many people think the real-time projections are videos. In this sense he is very much in the tradition of Church and other Hudson River landscape painters and like Church he controls where, when and how his work is seen. Because of this the work doesn't have the overbearing aura of digital art that other similar work does. Then again, he's just as much in the tradition of the text and language arm of Conceptual art as, say ,Lawrence Weiner. That's a sweet spot to be in. Oh, BTW: Free Asher B. Durand's Kindred Spirits from Wal-Mart's evil clutches! Robbin Murphy The Thing, Inc. 459 West 19th Street New York, NY 10011 [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://post.thing.net/blog/murphy # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
RE: nettime Landscape Painting in the Information Age
more projects to add to this list: http://www.c5corp.com/projects/landscape/index.shtml http://paglen.com/pages/projects/carceral/index.htm # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: nettime Landscape Painting of the Information Age
Also on the topic of the visual meshing of landscape and informatic processes, another project worth viewing is Susan Collins' project, 'Fenlandia': From May 2004, webcams are being installed in various sites - rural and technological - in Silicon Fen (East Anglia), Silicon Valley (M4 Corridor) and Silicon Glen (Scotland) for 12 months each. The webcams are harvesting images pixel by pixel, recording at different rates over the course of the year. Each image is collected from top to bottom and left to right in horizontal bands continuously, marking visible fluctuations in light and movement throughout the day and being archived at two hour intervals. A selection of these images are displayed and updated regularly in the archive section of this website. http://www.susan-collins.net/fenlandia # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: nettime Landscape Painting of the Information Age
Romanticism was a rebellion against the utilitarian stance of the enlightenment project, in which the world of nature was an emanation of spirit. Both a political and an artistic movement the romantics believed that art and poetry could restore the world to us by revealing what was behind it. But modernists in their turn repudiated romanticism, not only because the development of urbanised and technological society had marginalised the nature and landscapes of Herzen, Wordsworth, Freiderich and Constable etc with their peasants depicted living in sybiosis with nature (no calloused hands and summary evictions here). The spiritless world view of science had evolved beyond simple machanics expanding to envelope the life sciences. Moreover modernism also registered a deeper shift in the sense of how we understand nature. The Romantic notions of nature as a benifiscent spiritual reality came to be replaced by something closer to Schopenhauer?s a great amoral force ?nature red in tooth and claw?. These and other strands too complex to enumerate here came together to make the romantic view of nature in the contemplative sense which Armin refers to as untenable. Many modernists defined themselves (and continue to) as anti-romantic Also in method. To reject the romantic stance was also to reject the epiphanies of being. High modernism produces a poetics which strips away the aura of things, including the aura of the artist as romantic hero. Interestingly this repudiation of the romantcism gives rise to a profound poetics of its own which Roger Shatutuck has described as a poetics of ?juxtopisition?. This approach is to my mind more illuminating for our networked media than unproblematised versions of romanticism articulated thus far in this thread. To simplify (over simplify I know) the methods developed by the modernists *make things appear* or *to bring them into presence* Not in the sense of the old romantic language of being, whereby the object portrayed expresses a deeper reality; rather the illumination occurs *between elements* . ?Its as though the words or the images set up between them a force field which can capture a more intense energy?. The romantics are an inescapable part of our heritage and a source of who we modern westerners are (the good and the terrible) and although it is true that this part of our heritage is often overlooked and falsified any act of recuperation should also include a fuller account of the good reasons why Romanticism was repudiated. David Garcia # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: nettime Landscape Painting of the Information Age
i remember in simon schama's book 'landscape and memory' his part about the word landscape and its dutch root 'landschapen' excuse my spelling, and that is akin to the german landschaft - land= land(eng) schaffen=produce/make(eng). it was linked by schama to the root of landscape painting in mapping and the desire of aristocracy to picture their possessed land (in close-up). with this idea of landscape as a sort of mapping system, having little to do with raw nature or wilderness, but being a sort of imperial cultural product, there are many works online relating to mapping, one involving wolfgang, currently off-line and hopefully back on - humbot, produced some years back. a link between landscape vis a vis land art and telecommunication art could also be made, and there are works with varying amounts of success that approach networks as landscapes, geo-political, mapping, even gardens. philip pocock # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
nettime Landscape Painting of the Information Age
[This is another contribution to the Open Nature catalogue. I think it may also vaguely relate to the Ghost in the Network thread. cheers, armin] Landscape Painting of the Information Age or Romanticism In Media Art Armin Medosch In England, France and Germany during the age of rapid industrialisation a new direction in art emerged, romanticism. While the first modern factories were built the children of the middle class played out Arcadian fantasmagories dressing up as shepherds and shepherdesses in an idealized Greece.1 By playing those Arcadian games they did not only imitate and mock the aristocracy, they also asserted themselves as the rising new class. Angry young men stomped through the Swiss and German mountain forests writing revolutionary poems and plays2. It was a time of great social upheaval. Working classes were formed by driving peasants off common land. Owning neither land nor capital, the only way of making a living for the rural poor was moving to the cities and selling their labour to capitalist factory owners.3 Over the very same period of time landscape painting was 'discovered' as an art form. A 'naturalistic' approach to landscape painting had never before played a big role in European art. At the very time when the countryside vanished behind the smoking chimneys of the Industrial Revolution art reconstructed Nature as a mirror for the aspirations of the noble mind. As the schizophrenia of modernity settled in, nature became a very fertile ground for the imagination. Romanticism emerged from the contradiction of trying to be one with nature and feeling to be fundamentally separated from it. Nature was being objectified by the making- doing of the industrial revolution and its loss at the same time mourned in the arts. The search for nature contained also a political question. When the romantic youth contemplated nature, they could see, in the shape of the mountain ridges, in this frozen moment of time, the powerful forces at work that were reshaping the world. In romanticism wild nature symbolized the political changes of the time. Could nature give an answer to ethical questions, could there be a 'natural' form of government, was then the theme of many debates? Rosseau constructed a noble savage, externalizing the European confusion, as a type of human more in tune with nature than the urbanized citizens of France. As a psychological entity, the noble savage is very much in effect still today, having gone through all the cliches of Hollywoodization and advertisement treatment. European intellectuals turned away -- in a move they will repeat again and again -- from the city. The dirty and overpopulated cities were conceived as the seat of all evil. This is where political struggles and revolutions were fought, where the police state was enforced, where new diseases were bread and could spread rapidly because of the proximity of people living so closely together. The city was the place of new forms of social coercion, of alienation, of being repressed. Only in contact with nature, suitably refashioned and aestheticized, the citizens of the 19th century could get in contact with the true, the divine self. Romantic landscape painting created nature as a window to the self, a subjectivity that is transcended by opening itself up to nature. Nature and society, the city and the countryside were at odds with each other. The English Enlightenment produced a compromise solution. On the relatively small and relatively overpopulated part of the British Isles that is England 'natural' countryside had almost ceased to exist. The English park was invented, a nature that is better than nature, an idealistic version of it, combed and groomed to look natural in a desired way. Nature survives as an artefact, a theme park of itself, which reflects the taste of rich landowners. Romanticism has never really left the arts, even if it, as an official movement, petered out somewhere at the end of the 19th century. But the basic attitude of the romantic hero -- her or his fundamental opposition to bourgoise society, which they were also so deeply part of -- survived, and so did the trope of 'wild nature' as a mirror of psychological and socio-political conflict. The romantic hero is a tragic hero because he or she has not understood the contradictions of the society s/he is part of. A repressive social situation will always trigger escapist fantasies. Rejection of society as it is and idealistic protest either leads to death, which salvages the hero status, retreat into Arcadia = the hippie commune or the third way solution of getting a post in academia. There were very few traditions in the contemporary art of the last 100 years which were not romanticist or did not have a romantic streak, namely those, which were explicitely revolutionary and analytical. The romantic hero survived in the art
Re: SV: nettime Landscape Painting of the Information Age
In the summer of 2004 the New York-based artist Laura Kurgan exhibited four large prints based on data collected by commercial earth-observation satellites, at the Whitney Museum at Altria in New York City. She called the work Monochrome Landscapes. The New Yorker magazine reviewer wrote (issue of 5 July 2004): Laura Kurgan's digital satellite photographs of landscapes reduced to monochrome fields provide a glimpse of how transporting both visually and conceptually art based on digits can be. - Tom Keenan On Thu, 19 May 2005, Thomas Petersen wrote: The only artist, as far as I know, who literally creates landscape painting of the information age is Wolfgang Staehle. Here's a couple of quite literal digital landscapes: Monochrome Landscapes www.crossover.dk/landscape # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
