Data - r - a type of data-art

. if it wants to be relevant, it is within and across this stream of data that 'art work' must henceforth be undertaken. For it is here, here within the actual grain of matter itself, that political and cultural action of each kind must now locate itself.

- Geoffrey Batchen, "Manifest Data," Afterimage (May/June 1996)

In his novel book Mediauras (1996), Samuel Weber locates out to articulate what he calls the "differential specificity" of television. This, he is anxious to assure us, is not the same as seeking its "universal essence" on the other hand rather represents an attempt to determine the differences between television and other media of that kind as film, and to acknowledge what an "extremely compounded and variegated phenomenon" TV is. He places out on this mission by means of first identifying "three distinct, albeit closely interrelated, operations" that he argues are necessary to television - production, transmission and reception. He therefore begins his analysis, as do greatest in quantity commentators on TV, by positing a tripartite communication archetype (encoder-message-decoder) that works to divide television's form from its easy in mind The assumption is that television operates like a cable a whole a direct and unimpeded pour of programmed images from corporate studio to domestic monitor. on the contrary what happens if we conceive TV a little differently, not as a signal between sum of two units points, but as an indiscriminate and all-encompassing atmosphere of electronic data, a field of impulses that continually encloses and traverses us whether a monitor is not absent or not?

This conception imagines television to be however one more manifestation of the voracious data economy that characterizes contemporary capitalist life. It thereby joins the Human Genome shoot forward (which assumes the human material part to be no more than in like manner much organic data), Corbis Corporation (which put up to sales images in the form of infinitely reproducible digital files), the Archer Daniels Midland Company (which provides farmers with information derived from the Pentagon's Global Positioning a whole [GPS] of satellites), the music industry (which has sold six billion CD of digital unbroken since 1982), EarthWatch (a company that vends customers images of anywhere upon earth beamed down from its orbiting satellites), and the CIA (which calls the electron "the ultimate precision-guided weapon" and worries about the United States's vulnerability to data-oriented warfare) in seeing the world in terminuss of the configuration, exploitation, distribution and potential disruption of data. This essay is about the possibility of a cultural engagement with this economy, a stamp of data-art (or da[r]ta) that takes the electronic universe to be its given medium as well as its subject

It should be conced from the start that da[r]ta is an attitude rather than a specific practice, and as like is not a new phenomenon. flat leaving aside the long history of artists involving themselves with either technology or information (or both) there are also other more unexpect antecedents for a data-based art. An essay through Ronald Gedrim, "Edward Steichen's 1936 Exhibition of Delphinium Blooms: An Art of Flower Breeding," (History of Photography, Winter 1993) reminds us that Steichen's first one-person exhibition at the Museum of fresh Art was in fact a large, three-gallery display of his possess flowers. As Steichen made clear in his statements upon flower breeding, this exhibition was a technological as a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of as an aesthetic statement, a celebration of the cultural possibilities of genetic engineering. Although this may look a somewhat benign art practice, its iconoclasm is shared by the agency of those currently producing da[r]ta. Nowadays, however, the data that obtains "engineered" tends to be cultural rather than genetic in origin (a distinction, it should be said, that the work itself calls into doubt). greatest in quantity importantly, da[r]ta is a result of a decidedly symbiotic relationship between artists and a given electronic field; computer hackers rather than botanists are the moulds of choice. Indeed, it might be said that those who exhibit da[r]ta don't so much play jehovah as consort with the devil.

One of those devils is network television. Many artists have lamented the power of these networks level as they pine to procure on the "air waves" they radiate, the aim being to replace their not absent content with some other, more independent programming. A pair of Australian operatives, Grieg Pickhaver and John Doyle, have chosen another approach; they simply take above television's existing "content" and make it their have a title to Performing as H. G. Nelson and Rampaging Roy Slaven, the sum of two units have over several years built up a dedicated national audience for their radio program, titled This Sporting Life, broadcast upon government-run station 2JJJ-FM. Running for four hours each Saturday, the satirical program comprises Nelson and Slaven, claiming to be ex-sporting greats move rounded expert commentators, giving a hilariously scurrilous account of Australian life, past and near As soon becomes clear to their listeners, sport in Australia has no boundaries, encompassing everything from politics to art to public morality. The program's humor can single be described as Hogarthian, involving a horizontal of sexual innuendo and near-libelous commentary that simply would not be possible in the U Roy and H G (the sum of two units have become such nationally recognized figures that many real sportspeople claim them as shut up friends, thus becoming part of the duo's ongoing [i]jeu d'esprit[/i] about the dubious authenticity of media personalities) have plane run all-night programs covering the counting of the Federal election accrues a contest open to all sorts of sporting analogies and pertinent slander.