Christine Buci-Glucksmann | Dieter Daniels | Steve Dietz | Martin Dodge | Rudolf Frieling | Graham Harwood | Stephane Marchand-Maillet | Anne Nigten | Daniela Plewe | Warren Sack | Brett Stalbaum

Christine Buci-Glucksmann
The mapping gaze
Keynote lecture
The presentation of Christine Buci-Glucksmann had to be cancelled due to illness
We need to analyze the mapping gaze - from its origins to its totally contemporary, utopian and virtual forms. For the map as an artifact is a »plateau« with various strata and access points sketching out a new form of vision - namely one of projecting the infinite from above - and new kinds of abstraction, abstractions as diagrams. This icarian view is, thus, the view of the world which focuses a territory, a mobile and targeted gaze that has descriptive and constructive effects.
Does this mean that the map has become the model of the virtual in a time of globalization and a culture of currents and instabilities, a growingly »machinic« global time? Via its surfaces, topologies, its artifacts and archives this world-eye is being circled constantly like in a panopticon of the fleeing with all its strategies and esthetics.

^

Dieter Daniels
»Media Art Net 1: An Overview of Media Art« is the first module published in the Net and is accompanied by this volume of text. This module will serve as a foundation for all later modules, and reacts at the same time to an additional paradox of mediation in the media: even those relevant websites that deal with media art still lacked up until now a comprehensive introduction to this subject. We thus see in the exemplary selection of materials and source texts as well the semantic links made by both authors as well as the database an important prerequisite for developing approaches to a curriculum on media art. Free access to these materials is a central aspect of the project. In terms of subject matter, ten introductory essays dedicated both to historical developments as well as interlinking references in terms of content are collected to an »overview.«
www.medienkunstnetz.de
www.mediaartnet.org

^

Steve Dietz
Re:mapping the Public

View Video [9 Min.]

Mapping is not only an abstraction of geographic space. It is also a real time interface to dynamic flows of information - a social landscape that is site of an emergent - and threatened - public sphere. This talk will examine mapping of digital information as both the facility for »total information awareness« and a set of concrete strategies, as modeled by several artist projects, to make things public.
www.yproductions.com
www.walkerart.org/gallery9

^

Martin Dodge
Seeing inside the Cloud: some ways to map the Internet
What does the Internet look like? Conventionally, engineers have represented it as a cloud, a useful graphic shorthand to mask its complexity. In my presentation I consider how cartographic maps and graph visualisations are used to represent whats inside the Internet cloud. Maps are powerful because they do not just represent space, they are also active in the construction of space inside peoples heads. This is especially so in the construction of peoples cognitive conceptions of the Internet, as the infrastructure is largely invisible and intangible in everyday life.
Over the last thirty years or so, a huge range of different maps of the Internet have been produced, with diverse forms and function, from simple geographic plans of cable routes to complex real-time 3D visualisations. They have been produced for a number of distinct purposes from planning network deployment, operational management, to prove academic theories, as grad student projects, for market research, for setting policy and monitoring outcomes, and to try to sell things. And, of course, many have been motivated to map the internet for no particular reason other than because it is there. There are many different aspects of the internet that have been mapped from physical infrastructure, logical layers and protocols, traffic flows, user demographics. The maps cover a range of different scales from individuals, single buildings up to global scale. Many of these maps are beautiful and many more are really rather ugly. A few are actually quite useful, but many more are not very helpful at all. However, all the maps provide a fascinating picture of what the Internet looks like, or rather they provide some insights into what people think the Internet should look, once the clouds have cleared.
[Martin Dodge, Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College]
www.cybergeography.org

^

Rudolf Frieling
Introduction: »Media art must be transmitted in a multi-media way«
Media art—by definition multimedia, time-based or process-oriented - cannot be sufficiently mediated in book form. Mainstream art and cultural mediation, still being primarily print-based, do little justice to its specificity. On the other hand, Net-based media have not yet been able to establish platforms that reach more than the usual circle of insiders. Introducing the range of topics related to media and art, »Media Art Net« thus aims at establishing an Internet structure that offers highly qualified content by granting free access at the same time. Tendencies of art and media technology development throughout the twentieth century serve as the background for promoting historic and contemporary perspectives on artistic work in and with the media. A combination of diverse representational modes will offer a condensed, attractively presented multimedia focus for the interested ‹surfer› as well as profusely documented in depth information for users specifically involved in research. The main objective is, therefore, to establish theoretically and audio-visually convincing forms of relationships and references that cross the boundaries of genre.
»Media Art Net« foremost promotes topical cross references offering various access points: the classic index and search engine based on the complex structure of database links, the exploratory approach, the artistic perspective and the scientific-historic aspect as formulated in topical essays by competent authors. An initial step is the exemplary survey of historic and current positions and contexts of media art [also see the publication »Media Art Net 1: Survey«]. In a second phase, exploring seven thematic topics locates seminal interfaces between media and art where a network of curators will present a variety of approaches and contexts. One of these topics will be dedicated to »Mapping and Text«.

^

Graham Harwood
Nine[9] - Linker and other Subjective Mappings

View Video [8 Min.]

»Nine[9]« can be said to have two main tragectories. Primarily it is software built by and for those of us locked out of the narrowly engineered subjectivity of mainstream software. It is software which asks itself what kind of currents, what kind of machine, numerical, social and other dynamics it feeds in and out of, and what others it can help bring into being?
The second vector is related to this. It is software that is directly born, changed and developed as the result of an ongoing sociability between users and programmers in which demands are made on the practices of coding that exceed their easy fit into standardised social relations.
These two threads interweave in most cases. It is how they do so, how their multiple elements are brought into communication and influence that determines their level of success.
»Nine[9]« can most usefully be understood to work in these terms. It is a socio-technical pact between users of certain forms of license, language, cultures and environment. The various forms of its freeness or openess are being developed as part of the various rhythms of the life of this software; its production and critical engagement with the process of permission. In addition to this, »Nine[9]« requires new social machines to spawn its codes, to diffuse and manage its development and implementation.
http://9.waag.org

^

Stephane Marchand-Maillet
Collection Guiding
Any computer user in faced with an increasing amount of visual information in digital form [images, videos,...]. There is, therefore, an urgent need for usable tools to mine and manage such document collections. We have proposed the Viper/GIFT system for content-based query-by-example image retrieval as a solution to the problem of mining visual collections. The strong assumption, however, that the user is looking for something or at least knows specifically what (s)he is looking for may not always be true.
We also present a »queryless« approach for the management of visual multimedia document collections. This directs us towards the concept of »Collection Guiding« where the user embarks on a tour through the multimedia space that is automatically created using state-of-the-art techniques for automated visual document analysis. Our approach re-locates the user at the center of the system and sets back the emphasis on Human-Computer Interaction.
http://viper.unige.ch/~marchand/research/index.html

^

Anne Nigten
Beyond the Metaphor: Dynamic Mental Maps
In the field of mapping several categories may be distinguished, from information visualization maps, notation systems, the cartographic map to the associative or mental map. All these maps represent a certain reality, often based on a specific domain or discipline. E.g; Information visualization often offers a sliced or framed view based on statistics, cartographic maps represent a certain view based on the geographic aspects of our environment. Many mental maps offer a personal, emotional or artistic view on abstract data or information without any equivalent in our physical reality or according to a specific subjective interpretation of our life. Beyond the metaphor: dynamic mental maps deals with concepts of associative or mental maps in several artistic and community projects. Special attention will be paid to contextualization: the flexible gamut of meaning, the metadata and its [side] effects relevant for communication purposes. This presentation will approach the subject from an interdisciplinary perspective, including case studies developed or presented at V2 in Rotterdam [NL].
http://lab.v2.nl/projects/datacloud2.html

^

Daniela Plewe
ArtAbstracts
»ArtAbstracts« is an interactive meta-browser which substitutes in real-time the words of the «Media Art Net» website. The substitutions may be synonymous, abstract or more specific than the original expressions. By these variations ‹new interpretations› of artworks and interpretations of new ›artworks‹ are created. »ArtAbstracts« is the computational attempt in linguistics to generalize the incoming information purely with the aid of semantics. Empirical, causal or even strategic insights may not be extracted by that method. Yet, as a meta browser »ArtAbstracts« reconstructs and generalizes the representation of the artworks of the given database of «Media Art Net» and aims at triggering our fantasies—via abstraction.
»ArtAbstracts« is an artistic and theoretical project commissioned by the Center for Art and Media Technology Karlsruhe (ZKM) for the website »Media Art Net.«

^

Warren Sack
Picturing the Public: algorithms and interfaces for the presentation of public opinion

View Video [8 Min.]

Public opinion is something that governments and businesses claim to know and to respond to, but what exactly is ›public opinion‹? Social science research has produced a large variety of methods and technologies for measuring public opinion based on sampling: surveys, interviews, ethnographies, etc. Public discussions on the Internet provide a new opportunity to rethink the methods, techniques and politics of public opinion. Online, there are daily many, huge, email and newsgroup discussions involving thousands of people. These discussions, what we call very large-scale conversations [VLSCs] cover almost any topic. In these many-to-many VLSCs, the so-called ›public‹ is representing itself to itself and itself to others. The availability of these text archives in electronic form, along with recent text parsing and computational analysis tools allows a powerful, rigorous study of this form of communication for the first time. We have been developing new computational technologies that combine insights from conceptual art, linguistic and cultural anthropology, sociology of science and language, and computational linguistics to automatically summarize VLSCs. We hope that this technology, the »Conversation Map,« is useful for political experts, but also for citizen/participants in these new public spaces who want a picture of them ‹selves› that might be useful for community reflection and democratic self-governance. Culturally, we are interested in the new sorts of political strategies and tactics that these VLSCs allow and engender. A demonstration of the tools can currently be found online:
www.sims.berkeley.edu/~sack/CM/index.html

^

Brett Stalbaum
Database Logic[s] and Landscape Art
The aesthetic consequences of database can be viewed at different layers as implemented in IT systems such as geographic information systems. The most general of these layers are implementation [data and processing tiers] and representation [interfacial tier]. It is at the implementation level[s] that GIS data may be allowed to express itself and operate as a co-participant with artists. Because such data is typically 'big data', [data sets that test contemporary processing capabilities], artists need to take an explorative approach to practice with such data; a practice that may not find its primary nexus of expression or activity at the user interface. The questions to be answered regarding landscape and database are provisional; landscape data is a space ripe for exploration in part because the questions are not yet well formed. The tact that I take to begin to map the problem space is an analysis including semiology, precession, and abstract machines; all as they relate to models that instantiate the actual, including database modeling techniques such as entity relationship modeling. Data lies in a conversational relationship between the political/cultural realm and the actual landscape itself. Data is real and capable of actualization due to its virtual form, where virtuality is not considered as an artifact of computational machinery, but rather in Deluzinan terms as abstract machines, or general processes of instantiation of the actual. Because data can be considered as an actualizing agent [through its virtual nature] whose network of relations is not contained entirely within discrete state systems [IT], artists working with database might seek to explore/reveal subject-less and autopoietic relations of data in addition to those constrained by relational algebra. The methodologies for such explorations are not entirely clear at this time, but C5 suspects that systems emphasizing the paradigmatic axis foregrounded by database as cultural form should become the primary concern for any consideration of expression in art performance. This is the key for contemporary exploration of the actual territories that stubbornly remain even after their supposed disappearance behind their model or their map, and may provide a platform for developing general insights into emerging datascapes.
www.c5corp.com

^

© 2012 ZKM | Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe :: Impressum/Web Site Credits