Data_Space_interface

I will start this paper by investigating concerns with the artists role in the development of what we could describe as communication space or data space. The main focus will be to suggest various areas of spatial techno-interfacialty and how we can influence the reconstruction of this dataspace.

What Brunelleschi achieved with his peephole device was to create a spatial paradigm, this paradigm needs to be reinvented with an artist at the helm.

Victor Burgin states

"Modern space (inaugurated in the Renaissance) is Euclidean, horizontal, infinitely extensible, and therefore, in principle, boundless. In the early modern period it is the space of the humanist subject in its mercantile entrepreneurial incarnation. In the late modern period it is the space of industrial capitalism, the space of an exponentially increased pace of dispersal, displacement and dissemination, of people and things. In the 'postmodern' period it is the space of financial capitalism". [1]

 

Dataspace could have been the next space Burgin misses out of his equation. After the 'dispersal, displacement and dissemination' dataspace can produce disorientation, dislocation, claustrophobia and denial of difference.

Other possibilities of understanding the ramifications of the statement by Burgin concerning our awareness to space are made evident by Jordan Crandall article 'Bioinformatic Alignments'. Here Crandall talks about the recent development of a technological device to assist blind people in their need to find safe ways of navigating physically through our city space. A hearing device is worn which is in turn linked to the military's network of global positioning satellites. When the blind person came in the vicinity of objects in their path, these objects would then speak a description of what and where they were. [2] On one hand this would be very useful, to have a sonic map of the world around you but on the other it has sinister implications. It is the company or person who owns the map and what they choose to leave on it that dictates its credibility. These implications of the device would be realised when you found that unusual proportions of blind people were eating at Macdonalds.

 

"It would probably be at least another generation or two before we have consensus on the shape of that space, but if we are to believe what art and science have been saying, it is probable that that space would exist in time, be an interactive process and organised horizontally with a geometry quite different from the Euclidean geometry of renaissance perspective". [3]

 

Don Foresta shows how the establishment of a technological concept of space is not yet fully developed. This spatial issue has most attention still fixed on a corporate fictional idea of the future space, which might in turn be based on the same arbitrary vanishing points, which Panofsky refers to as 'being devoid of all content'.

Perspective has traditionally given the viewer the idea of immersion by creating the illusion of depth. The viewer can not physically enter the work, only conceptually. In most cases this demands of the viewer some prior knowledge of a perspectival gaze. The viewer sees through a conditioned response towards developing their understanding, like looking through a window. The interfacialty with the dataspace is the most limiting factor at present but as this becomes more transparent, as the computer disappears, all that you will be left with is computer vision.

The dataspace vision will redefine visual art theory and the cognitive processing of perspectival traditions. This when placed in relationship to the potential of virtual reality changes our mass subjectivity in the way we engage in the perception and representations of things. The dataspatial relationship that is to become part of our mass subjectivity needs to be initially constructed through cultural, critical and artistic concerns for the social. This spatiality could be seamless, imaginative, phenomenological and inclusive. The change could come from the liquid nature of this dataspace and stem from its capacity for immersion.

The dilemma of this technology arises through the loss of orientation, denial of alterity and then disassociation. What we have is a transformation of infinite smallness; the moving of one form into another carried out a pixel at a time. This denial can be seen in a technique called morphing 'which attempts to erase this binarism in the homogeneous, seamless, and effortless movement of transformation and implied reversibility' [4] Through this disassociation a concern needs to develop for a reinvestigation of a spatial attitude for decoding the world. To put art and artist at the pro-active stage in the development of dataspace is in my mind what is of critical importance. Its relevance to social aspects of life will be to create a bridge between the corporatised view of the developing spatiality and a social view.

Paul Virlio states

"A duplication of sensible reality, into reality and virtuality, is in the making. A stereo-reality of sorts threatens. A total loss of the bearings of the individual looms large. To exist, is to exist in situ, here and now, hic et nunc. This is precisely what is being threatened by cyberspace and instantaneous, globalized information flows". [5]

Or as Sue Best pointed out

"How does one articulate something like a new identity in a globalsied art world when the tools of expression have become so blatantly internationalised?" [6]

 

Henri Levebvre suggests space as being transformed into a lived experience as developed through the social subject. [7]The social subject is a construct of the viewer and is relative to a form of social conditioning. A rupture needs to occur at the heart of seeing to be able to divert this conditioning. This lived experience should not be based upon vanishing points devoid of all content but a reconsideration of a social environmental fabric.

This socially lived space could be the basis from which to build an experience of dataspace. This means that social aspects that are born from perspectival awareness of space need to be reconsidered. This reconsideration of this perspectival space is not something that can necessarily be positioned into a historical cultural context. What has transpired with modern technology will demand we reconsider and contextualise perspectival space before it is taken away out of our control.

We are already polluted with a perspectival indoctrination but artists must push beyond this form of social conditioning. The change will not come from the emergence of new technology itself but from a creative mediated resistance within it. A mediated resistance does not mean a denial of what is to happen but more a criticality based on pro-active involvement within the arena of the human interface to dataspace.

The most fascinating and interesting dimension in today’s visual arts education is emerging confrontations through technologies and the new dialogues they open with perception and representation.

In this years Ars Electronica 2001 Gerfried Stocker's statement expresses part of the dilemma "The traditional rituals of access to the world of art are irrelevant, and many no longer even bother to seek accreditation from the art establishment.

The scene is defined by self-reinventors and spin-offs who have acquired their softskills in direct dealings with the material or as by products of the media design institutes, most of which are oriented on the training of media workers."[8]

Virillo states

"What lies ahead is a disturbance in the perception of what reality is; it is a shock, a mental concussion. And this outcome ought to interest us. Why? Because never has any progress in a technique been achieved without addressing its specific negative aspects. The specific negative aspect of these information superhighways is precisely this loss of orientation regarding alterity (the other), this disturbance in the relationship with the other and with the world. It is obvious that this loss of orientation, this non-situation, is going to usher a deep crisis which will affect society and hence, democracy". [9]

 

It is my opinion that as the visual representation of the world collapses around us, the collapse must not only be resisted but also transposed and tested. The most useful way to do this is to question the perceptual interpretations formed through these new technologies and their role in forming the world around us. The most obvious people to start exploring these questions for society are artists who have a history of researching the concepts of space and its social ramifications. The ability to renegotiate perspectival constraints is the vital research for artists at this point in time. This is not only to explore the theoretical aspects but also to offer visual possibilities that will engage the viewer to reconsider the interpretation of their gaze.

Paul Thomas

Director of the Studio for Electronic Arts

http://www.visiblespace.com


 

[1] Victor Burgin Psychoanalysis and Cultural Theory:Thresholds; ed Donald James (Macmillain Education 1991) pg 15

[2] Jordan Crandall 'Bioinformatic Alignments' The information is then transmitted via sound to the ears with a precise timing and volume to mimic the exact distance and position of the objects, as if the objects themselves were suddenly able to speak their names. The blind person then interprets this information and acts accordingly, his or her world suddenly animated through strategic, surgically- precise intervention of sound pitch and timing.

[3] Don Foresta Don Foresta Souillac Charter

http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-journals/Leonardo/isast/articles/souillac/malvy.html

[4] Vivian Sobschack Meta Morphing

[5] Paul Virilo http://www.ctheory.com/a30-cyberspace_alarm.html

[6] Sue Best Real Time Feburary 1997

[7]Henri Lefebvre The Production of Space Blackwell UK 1994 p 192

[8] Gerfried Stocker Ars Electronica 2001 http://www.aec.at/takeover

[9] Paul Virilo http://www.ctheory.com/a30-cyberspace_alarm.html

 

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