Data Undermining
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ABSTRACT: The large quantities of data now being generated via networked communications are also being managed, regulated and interpreted into patterns that are comprehensible to humans. The management of data is undertaken by sophisticated sampling, tracking and automated techniques and the results of these are frequently sequestered to become the property of corporations and institutions such as Google or the US military. Even when data flows ‘freely’ through the net, the operations of search engines, databases, digests and feeds such as RSS increasingly makes this manipulation of data invisible. Techniques such as aggregation smooth out the differentials of data’s constitution and present us instead with a flattened landscape of information. The sources, processes and contexts, which make information meaningful, are rendered imperceptible.
¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 How have networked artistic practices responded to this emerging terrain of the imperceptible conditions for the generation of data? This chapter will examine the work of online and offline networked art practices that seek to undermine the broader flow of data toward a general cultural state of imperceptibility. These artists render visible the real technical and social relations that comprise the production of data in networked culture. I hope to collaboratively think through these projects, zigzagging collectively through a mesh of artistic practice that makes the automatisms and aggregation of data palpably perceptible. A number of projects will be suggested for exploration: Antidatamining by the collective rybn.org; Nicholas Knouf’s MAICgregator; Eduardo Navas’ Traceblog; ShiftSpace. It is hoped that new projects will also come to light through networked participation.
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BIOGRAPHY: Anna Munster is a writer, artist and educator in the area of new media arts and theory. In 2006 she published the book Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics (Dartmouth College Press) and writes for the journals CTheory, Fibreculture, Culture Machine among others on networked culture and art, biomedia and bioart and contemporary art and politics. She helped to found the journal Fibreculture and is actively involved in online list cultures and their on and offline projects and events. She works collaboratively with Michele Barker in the area of immersive and multi-channel audio-visual installation, exploring the relationship of visuality and neuroscience.
¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 0 Munster works as an associate professor at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, Sydney Australia. Her current research investigates dynamic media, particularly the relations between the technical aspects of networks and network visualisations on the one hand, and emergent forms of cultural and aesthetic experience on the other.
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