.
http://www.whw.hr/
http://www.kulturnikapital.org/OrganisationsEn/WhatHowAndForWhom
How to do things with data
a dataesthetics discussion forum
Nov 30 2006.
7 pm- 10 pm
Cinema Mosor, Zvonimirova 63, Zagreb
Participants: Léonore Bonaccini i Xavier Fourt/ Bureau d’études,
Aaron Gach/ Center for Tactical Magic, Miran Mohar i Borut Vogelnik /
IRWIN, Trevor Paglen, Naeem Mohaiemen
##########
Dataesthetics
A group show @ Gallery Nova
Teslina 7, Zagreb, Croatia
Dec 12 2006-Jan 6 2007
Opening Friday, 1.12.2006, 8 PM
The Atlas Group, Jean - Pierre Aubé, Martha Rosler, Bureau d’études,
Mark Lombardi, Center for Tactical Magic, IRWIN, Trevor Paglen, Marko
Peljhan/I-TASC, Bálint Szombathy, Mladen Stilinovi, Visible Collective
(Mohaiemen, Roy, Huq, Lin, Nimoy, et al)
Curated by: Stephen Wright
########
Data has become the most pervasive – and intangibly invasive – feature
of contemporary life; of life become data. Life systems have been the
object of sustained data gathering since the time of the
Enlightenment, and cartography, flow charts, graphs and statistica;
databases have played a preponderant role in the shift from a society
based on discipline to contemporary regimes of biopolitical control,
where information is inseparable from the exercise of power. Though it
is still commonly held that “the map is not the territory” – that is,
that life can neither be confused with nor certainly reduced to its
informational content – the vast expansion in data gathering
facilitated by digital nano-technologies and integrated networks
suggests that a qualitative transformation in governance may become
possible through the sheer quantity of available data. Is the dream of
total management on the verge of becoming a reality, whereby action on
the map is at the same time action on the territory? “You have nothing
to fear if you have nothing to hide” has become the chorus of
real-information ideologues; yet to be an individual is to have
something to hide…
Artists have only comparatively recently come to take a sustained
interest in the phenomenon of information display, classification,
compiling – in short, in what might be referred to as dataesthetics.
This exhibition brings together twelve artists and artist collectives
who use data as their artistic material. Working with cognitive
mapping, discursive form, or envisaging knowledge production and
research as a full-fledged artistic practice (rather than a prelude to
producing artwork), these artists seek to foreground the heuristic and
socially critical potential of data use.
Plainly, such practices have precedents in the conceptual art
producers of an earlier generation, sharing with them a broad critique
of administered lives, bureaucratised minds and instrumental
rationality. Of course, the aesthetics of data is not merely about
ordering facts and figures; it is equally about disorganising and
subverting the rational arrangement of information and our reliance on
databases. Dataesthetics seeks to foreground some of the most
cutting-edge practices in the field of research-based art while at the
same time anchoring them in an art-historical framework. From this
perspective, it can be argued that the data-based practices of many
contemporary artists give conceptual art the opportunity to
potentially reinvent itself, giving it an unforeseen use value, by
injecting artistic competence into collaborative initiatives beyond
the confines of the artworld.
Dataesthetics is a three-phrase project, comprising an exhibition, a
discussion forum with the artists and the publication of a bilingual
reader, featuring critical writings by theorists and artists working
in the field of dataesthetics.
Stephen Wright
***
30.11.2006. 19 h
cinema Mosor, Zvonimirova 63, Zagreb
How to do things with data
a dataesthetics discussion forum
participants: Léonore Bonaccini i Xavier Fourt/ Bureau d’études,
Aaron Gach/ Center for Tactical Magic, Miran Mohar i Borut Vogelnik /
IRWIN, Trevor Paglen, Naeem Mohaiemen /Visible Collective
moderated by : Stephen Wright
Art production long sought to protect the relatively autonomous sphere
it had eked out for itself from any incursion by the potentially
deadening logic of knowledge production and data gathering and
display. In the face of the sheer glut and facile allure of
purpose-driven information and rationality, art’s self-assigned role
was to affirm its radical uselessness. Yet as knowledge has become
inseparable from power, many practitioners have come to see art and
art-related activity as an extradisciplinary and even potentially
subversive field of inquiry. Though such practices are often described
as content-driven, it is perhaps more accurate to consider them in
terms of their discursive form. Critical cartography, tactical magic
and database use have become integral components of artistic
competence, which refuses to leave social critique to the social
sciences. Bringing together Aaron Gach of the Center for Tactical
Magic, Naeem Mohaiemen of the Visible Collective, Trevor Paglen,
Léonore Bonaccini and Xavier Fourt of Bureau d’études and Stephen
Wright, the discussion forum will focus on the performative dimension
of data-based research and its display – that is, on how to do things,
socially critical things, with dataesthetics.
discussion forum participants
Bureau d’etudes
Bureau d’études is a Paris-based media collective founded in 1998,
comprised of the artist-duo Léonore Bonaccini and Xavier Fourt. Using
complex graphic tables conceived for the Internet, they map various
hidden global structures of finance and world governance, formalising
patterns and connections through scientific and informational
exactitude. Their work can be viewed online at bureaudetudes.free.fr
or http://utangente.free.fr/
Aaron Gach is Visiting Faculty in the Design+Technology department at
San Francisco Art Institute. He was inspired by studies with a private
investigator, a magician, and a ninja to form the Center for Tactical
Magic—an organization dedicated to the amalgamation of art,
technology, magic, and activism. Working across disciplines—art,
design, architecture, and community service—Gach’s collaborations have
involved members of the Black Panthers, Earth First!, and the American
Red Cross to name a few. www.tacticalmagic.org
IRWIN
IRWIN was founded in 1983 as the visual-arts component of the
Slovenian art collective NSK, based in Ljubljana. Together with many
collaborators they started a project East Art Map intended to serve as
an orientation tool in the still-undefined field of the art of the
East. The aim of the East Art Map is to show the art of the entire
space of Eastern Europe, to take artists out of their national
frameworks and present them in a unified scheme. www.eastartmap.org
Naeem Mohaiemen is a filmmaker and media artist working in New York
and Dhaka. His projects include Visible Collective
(disappearedinamerica.org), "The Young Man Was No Longer A Terrorist"
(Dictionary of War, Mufathalle), and "Muslims or Heretics: My Camera
Can Lie?" (UK House of Lords). Essays include "Islamic Roots of
Hip-Hop" (Sound Unbound, MIT Press, DJ Spooky ed.), "Terrorists or
Guerillas in the Mist" (Sarai 06, part of Documenta 12 journal
project) and "Why Mahmud Can't Be a Pilot") (Nobody Passes, Matt
Bernstein ed.). disappearedinamerica.org
Trevor Paglen is an artist, writer, and experimental geographer
working out of the Department of Geography at the University of
California, Berkeley. His work involves deliberately blurring the
lines between social science, contemporary art, and a host of even
more obscure disciplines in order to construct unfamiliar, yet
meticulously researched ways to interpret the world around us. His
most recent projects take up secret military bases, the California
prison system, and the CIA’s practice of “extraordinary rendition.”
www.paglen.com
curator and moderator
Stephen Wright is an art writer and programme director at the Collège
international de philosophie (Paris). "Dataesthetics" follows “Rumour
as Media” (Aksanat, Istanbul), following “In Absentia” (Passerelle,
Brest) and “The Future of the Reciprocal Readymade” (Apexart, NYC), as
part of a series of exhibitions examining art practices with low
coefficients of artistic visibility, which raise the prospect of art
without artworks, authorship or spectatorship.
Dataesthetics is part of the project Zagreb – Cultural Kapital of
Europe 3000
http://www.kulturnikapital.org
_______________________________________________
nettime-ann mailing list
[email protected]
http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-ann
