Originally published in Switch, Vol. 5, N. 3, 2000. http://switch.sjsu.edu.
Memory_Archive_Database v 3.01
By Steve Dietz
In 1968, in a report to the Rockefeller Foundation during a residencyat SUNY Stony Brook, Nam June Paik argued that 97% of all electronic musicwas not recorded and that "a simple measure would solve the wholeproblem. An information center for unpublished electronic media shouldbe created."2 Of course, at the time, this meant such a center would"provide a xerox copy and a tape copy of musical pieces, at the requestof performers, students, and organizers from all over the world."Still, convert analog to digital, and the dream lives on, perhaps morevibrant than ever, of a universal archive, with access to everything byanyone anywhere at anytime.
For the past 25+ years, museums and other cultural institutions havebeen trying to figure out, first how to automate their information systems--createcomputer-based databases--and, more recently, how to provide the publicaccess to this "automated information."3
Now that we institutions have begun to implement, with the advent ofthe World Wide Web, the public access side of things, one of the dirtysecrets we are hiding is that many people don't care that much about theinformation museums have so assiduously gathered--dimensions, medium, provenanceand much of the other important but less-than-fascinating minutiae of museuminformation systems.
Information such as this is sometimes referred to as "tombstone"information by museum professionals. From the Walker Art Center�s onlinedatabase http://www.walkerart.org/resources/
As Hal Foster put it,
"Is there a new dialectics of seeing allowed by electronic information?. . . Art as image-text, as info-pixel? An archive without museums? Ifso, will this database be more than a base of data, a repository of thegiven?"4
To the extent that "museumification" is a kind of classification,it is no wonder that many artists are skeptical, at best, of the mausoleumizingof the vibrant net culture they have been creating and participating in.To a large extent, "new media" is an activity, not always a product,and, to paraphrase Barnett Newman, databases are for art what ornithologyis for birds.
Database Culture + Datapoesis
In Interface Culture, Steven Johnson argued, in essence, that the interfaceis omnipresent, a defining aspect of contemporary culture.5 Almost unbelievablyMerriam-Webster® suggests that database first came into use around1962. I would argue that the database has become the backend, so to speak,of interface culture. Even when there does not exist, technically speaking,a "collection of data, or information, that is specially organizedfor rapid search and retrieval," the potential of getting-retrieving-findingwhat you want is omnipresent, just on the other side of the interface.
Database culture is only partly a reflection of the rise of the Internetand Microsoft sloganeering about "Where do you want to go today?™"It is mirrored more generally in what Simon Nora and Alain Minc describedin a 1978 report to the French government as the "computerizationof society."6 Even in the art world, this transformation was prescientlyalluded to by Leo Steinberg in his classic "Other Criteria" (1968,1972).
"The flatbed picture plane makes its symbolic allusion to hardsurfaces such as tabletops, studio floors, charts, bulletin boards--anyreceptor surface on which objects are scattered, on which data is entered,on which information may be received, printed, impressed--whether coherentlyor in confusion. The pictures of the last fifteen to twenty years insiston a radically new orientation, in which the painted surface is no longerthe analogue of a visual experience of nature but of operational processes.
"Yet [the flatbed] is no more than a symptom of changes which gofar beyond questions of picture planes, or of painting as such. It is partof a shakeup which contaminates all purified categories. The deepeninginroads of art into non-art continue to alienate the connoisseur as artdefects and departs into strange territories leaving the old stand-by criteriato rule an eroding plain."7
Even as art and artists abandon a purified aesthetics and question thevalue of museological classification schema, within the context of thecomputerization of society in general, many artists are working to destabilizethese activities by a methodology that might be described as "datapoesis,"freeing data for a different trajectory, as Manuel Delanda put it in aninterview with Switch staff members in Switch v3n3:
"Strata may be geological, biological or social, but in all casesthey represent a way of constraining the spontaneous creativity of matter-energy,of linking it to stable, durable, stratified forms. (rocks, plant or animalbodies, social institutions). In nature there are also, destratifying processes,which detach a particular structure from it fixed function, and open itup to a new one, like the mouth of a bird which is detached from a flowof food, a purely digestive function, to become linked to a flow of song,a more expressive function, used to mark a territory and seduce mates.The artist is that agent (human or not) that takes stratified matter-energyor sedimented cultural materials, and makes them follow a line of flight,or a line of song, or of color. (emphasis added)"8
Institutions cannot afford not to try and understand, present, collect,and preserve contemporary artistic activities. We would do well, however,to explore artists� process as well as their "product," finetuning the signal-to-noise ratiothe surprise--of what we want to deliver.
The Artist as Unreliable Archivist
The Unreliable Archivist by Janet Cohen, Keith Frank, and Jon Ippolitowas commissioned by the Walker as both a parasitic archive of äda'weband a meta-commentary on the act of the Walker archiving such a remarkableand vibrant collective project.
The Unreliable Archivist, like any good archivist, creates metadataabout äda'web. In this case it just happens to be a little, shallwe say, idiosyncratic. . . . The value of a standard like the Categoriesfor the Description of Works of Art is its precision--at least for experts.It allows one to make minute differentiations between objects. It allowsfor the discovery of specific known objects from vast databases. What itis not so good at is making connections or finding things one doesn't knowabout. Think of the difference between searching for a 20th-century portraitmade of wood and searching for something that has ambiguous language, enigmaticimages, and preposterous style.
When I first saw The Unreliable Archivist, I took it to be anhomage to the wonderful, breathtaking excesses of äda'web and thosewho created it. I also took it to be a parody, a tongue-in-cheek commentaryon the butchery that archiving--mothballing--such a dynamic institutionas the Walker could entail. I still think these conclusions are true, butmy concern has changed. Rather than worrying about how unreliable the archivistis, perhaps we should map the whole Walker collection according to thesecategories and values. What would happen?
It is possible to imagine a future in which everything is archived--fromour credit data to our memories, from world events to passionate encounters.How then do we create systems that allow each of us to be an unreliablearchivist? To create the preposterous, the enigmatic? No matter how intelligentarchiving agents are in 2020, they will be poor substitutes if they can'trepresent an individual point of view.
Technologies to the People®
"It is good for the artist to insinuate himself into the open meshof any systemnot in a provocative and visible way, but mimetically,using their same mediums."
--Maurizio Cattelan
Daniel Garcia Andujar's "Video Collection" is what I wouldcall a typical net.art gesture. It appropriates the developing practicesof the Internet--in this case database-like streaming content as well asits series of unhelpful help desk messages--and yokes them to culturaland societal desires--in this case database-access to significant but notalways easy-to-find cultural resources. While there is a clear elementof épater le bourgeois with this work, one less predictable outcomeis the economic issues that get raised. Andujar was written to by at leasttwo artist and/or cultural institution representatives with questions thatstarted out along the lines of "how did you do this" (technically)and ended, more or less," how dare you do this." The issue isonly partly an economic one, really. By being so opaque about his project,Andujar also highlights the tension between the ideal of transparency innet cultureand in archivingand the fact that information is knowledgeandpowerwhether it is about the arcana of technological capabilitiessuch as streaming media or the arcana of classification schema.
The Social Filter: The File Room
The notions of openness and non-exclusivity can be problematic enoughfor institutions, but one of the cornerstones of museum culture is authoritativenessand selectivity. The pioneering example of Antonio Muntadas's File Room,however, points to a very different model--of bi-directional informationflows, multi-nodal information sources, collaborative filtering, multiplepoints of view, the transgression of geographic and discipline boundaries,and the comingling of specialist and non-specialist.
The File Room is a particularly interesting example because it is aboutcensorship. Explicitly, it is about specific instances of censorship thathave occurred anywhere in the world. Implicitly, however, it is about thefact that there has been no easily and publicly accessible source for thisinformation; that subjects of censorship have often been beholden to traditionalnews sources to tell their stories, and if they are told at all, they arenot always the story the subject would tell.
This kind of "filter," where the only filter is really thatpeople have to know about the resource and be willing to take the timeto upload to it, has been called a "social filter," and is presentin other "open archives" such as the network group ORANG, whichallows anyone who wishes to "collaborate" to have an accountto upload files or An Experience Base, A Boolean Typhoon, which also relieson the public at large to collaboratively create an SGML-based classificationscheme for a database of experiences.
To reinforce this issue of bypassing traditional institutional resources,The File Room was originally mounted as an effort of the alternative artistspace, the Randolph Street Gallery in Chicago, along with technical helpfrom the Electronic Visualization Lab at the University of Illinois atChicago. It is now hosted by another non-profit, alternative virtual organization.What makes museums think they are necessary for the propagation of netculture? At any rate, I would submit that it is impossible to adequatelyrepresent net culture without the integral involvement of the net community.
The Counter-Anatomical Database: ftp_formless_anatomy:
Alan Sekula in an important essay "The Body and the Archive"has pointed out the early role of photographic archives in the normalizationof the criminal surveillance system, not to mention the rise of eugenics.In terms of the origins of the photographic archive, which gave rise, inmany ways, to our present-day surveillance society, there were two importantpoles:
"[t]he Paris police official Alphonse Bertillon invented the firsteffective modern system of criminal identification. His was a bipartitesystem, positioning a 'microscopic' individual record within a 'macroscopic'aggregate."
"The English statistician and founder of eugenics, Francis Galton,invented a method of composite portraiture. . . . Through one of his severalapplications of composite portraiture, Galton attempted to construct apurely optical apparition of the criminal type."9
And Catherine Richard at a recent ISEA Cartographies symposium spokeof surveillance as one of the three primary manifestations of what shedescribed as the contemporary "collapse of the visual."10 Ofcourse, for those of us with popular culture tendencies, Enemy of the Stateconfirms that the U.S. government can spy on anyone anywhere. Gene Hackman,nevertheless, provides the practical advice that if Denzel Washington doesn�tlook up, he will remain safe, somewhat reminiscent of the "duck andcover" teachings of an earlier era. Inevitably, one must speculatethat in the near future fashionable hats on the Paris runways will be designedfor the pleasurable viewing of satellite surveillanceand subsequentdownloading from the Web, as a kind of tele-fashion mirror. Think aboutit.
In a much more rigorous way, Eugene Thacker's ftp_formless_anatomy:counter-anatomical database is precisely about how the databasing of thehuman body through the Visible Human project transforms it from subjectto object; something entirely suitable for surveillance--not just of onedead convict, but of anyone, whether webcasting surgery or giving birth.He writes in "Bioinformatics":
"This decoding [of biomedical technologies such as MRI] works doubly,since, on the one hand, it is an approach to the body completely mediatedthrough its production in imaging technologies, and, on the other, it isan assumption of the anatomical body inherited from modern anatomy as acorporeal, organized, mechanistic integral unit. The tensions of a technoculturecan be found here, between the body of modern anatomy and the body of postmodern�infomedicine,� and the body of the modern anatomy text book and the bodydisplayed on multiple scanning monitors are their technological correlatives."11
Data Body: Time Capsule
In an age in which we are increasingly aware of ourselves as databases,identified by social security numbers and genetic structures, it is imperativethat artists actively participate in how data is shaped, organised anddisseminated."
--Victoria Vesna12
In Time Capsule, Eduardo Kac has taken Vesna�s observation to a kindof logical extreme, self-implanting a bio-panoptic surveillance deviceamicrochip that contains a programmed identification number and that isintegrated with a coil and a capacitor, all hermetically sealed in biocompatibleglass. Scanning the implant generates a low energy radio signal that energizesthe microchip to transmit its unique and inalterable numerical code. Aspart of the procedure Kac registered himself in a database set up to aidin finding lost animals, classifying himself as both animal and owner.
For Kac, the kind of literal construction of the dead, anatomical bodythat Thacker points to, is manifest on a daily, ongoing basis as humansadapt to become extensions of the computerof the database/interface.
"As we experience it today, the passage into a digital culture--withstandard interfaces that require us to pound a keyboard and sit behinda desk staring at a screen--creates a physical trauma that amplifies thepsychological shock generated by ever-faster cycles of technological invention,development, and obsolescence. In its most obvious manifestation, thisphysical trauma takes the shape of carpal-tunnel syndrome and backaches.In its less evident form, current interface standardization has led toan overall containment of the human body, which is then forced to conformto the boxy shape of the computer setup (monitor and CPU). It is almostas if the body has become an extension of the computer, and not the otherway around. The need for alternative ways of experience in the digitalculture is evident."13
Datamining: C5
If the database, with its multiple fields for searching, is a directdescendent of the Bertillon cabinet, which managed to classify hundredsof thousands of subjects according to 12 measurements so that the smallestcategory in the system had no more than a dozen records, a descendent ofGalton's composite photograph is the composite data profile.
Beginning with Lisa Jevbratt's Stillman Projects, one of whichwas commissioned by the Walker Art Center, and continuing with the projects16 Sessions, 1:1, and, most recently, SoftSub, the artist group C5 hascreated a number of fascinating collaborative filtering projects that makemanifest the vast and subterranean data mining efforts that big and smallbusinesses alike are mounting to make a buck off your informationyourbody of data/databody.
The important thing about Galton's composite photograph was not whethersomeone did or did not look like it. No one did, by design. The intentwas in the mean differentiation. Individuals that approached the compositeprofile to a certain degree were suspect. In a similar way, composite dataprofiles of likely buyers and likely offenders are being created and asyour data profile approaches it, you will be acted on accordingly, whetherit is with spam or a visit from a government authority.
SoftSub is an opt in program. It is a screensaver that collects informationabout the file structure of a user�s computer. Data is collected only ifa user downloads the software and only if she decides to upload her personaldata. Here, an opposite approach to Andujar has a similar result. By foregroundingthe practice of conscientious opt-in, the standard practice of hidden ormurky data gathering procedures is highlighted. Also, it is important topoint out that SoftSub is collecting essentially benign information. Evenwith blatant misuse, what is C5 going to do? Post on the net the 100 messiestdesktops? C5's real interest is in trying to understand how to approachdata sets without a particular target in mind, because as with Galton,the understanding and use of supposedly objective measurements can be grosslysubverted by a particular intent.
Data Stories: DissemiNET
DissemiNET by Beth Stryker and Sawad Brooks, is a database-driven compilationof user-defined stories that is searched with a kind of fuzzy "curatorial"--asthey put it--selectivity that complements a dynamic visual display to createa compelling portrait of "The Disappeared" in Guatemala.
DissemiNET also has parallels to open archives such as The File Room,as anyone canat least during its initial installationupload theirstories related to the topic. More than being an open resource, however,it also attempts to represent and deal with notions of memory and lossand dispersion in a manner that is particularly appropriate to a computerizedsociety.
"Creating a repository for personal and social memory, DissemiNETuses web technologies to give visual form to the transactions (deposits,retrievals, and loss) through which we experience memory. The DissemiNETreelaborates terms such as "origin", "home(site)","diaspora", and "search", in terms of and through themechanisms of the web. Drawing parallels between diasporas and the dispersalof meaning over the web, DissemiNET in response provide spaces (lacunae)for people to recall and recollect, gathering there to re-tell storiesabout their own experiences with displacement and dispersal. Over time,DissemiNET will become a collection of such stories of errancy."14
DissemiNET lies somewhere between the particular instance and a compositewhole, but it is particularly interesting for the way, not unlike The UnreliableArchivist, the fuzzy algorithm creates relationships between storiesdata--asa way to investigate semi-automated storytelling, with a bit of a pointof view, in relation to very large data sets.
Searching for the Story: Anna Karenin Goes to Paradise
There will always be a tension between complete description of a specificindividual and a generalized description of a group. Neither tells thewhole story. One way to get beyond just the facts, of course, is to actuallytell a story. While storytelling may seem inimical to databases, the linguisticresearcher Walter Ong has determined that one of the great Western storytellers,Homer, substituted a stock set of phrases according to identifiable regularoccurrences. This is not exactly the same as saying that the Iliad is adatabase-driven hypertext, but it does hint that the storytelling and informationsystems are not inherently incompatible.
In a slyly funny piece, Anna Karenin Goes to Paradise, Olia Lialinatells the story of Anna Karenin as a comedy in three acts (and an epilog):Anna looking for love; Anna looking for train; Anna looking for paradise.The way Anna looks, of course, is through Web searches for the words love,train, and paradise. Lialina culls the results from the search enginesMagellan, Yahoo! and Alta Vista into 3 pages of pre-selections, and the"reader," is invited to get lost on her own train of data thoughts,before proceeding to the next act.
An interesting and somewhat disturbing aspect of the piece is that upwardsof 90% of the links in the story now return "page not found"errors, emphasizing, perhaps, not only the ineffability of love but alsothe ephemerality of the Web.
Databasing Forgetting: The Impermanence Agent
Plato is said to have complained about the invention of writing andhow it would compromise the art of rememberingnot to mention the artof conversation. Do we need to archive everything? You do not have to beMonica Lewinsky to suspect that it is not necessarily a good thing to havea permanent record of every email dispatched into the cybervoid.
Loss is an important aspect of memory, and impermanence may be the naturalstate of things. Noah Waldrop-Fruin's The Impermanence Agent is a remarkableproject that starts out as the story of the death of his grandmother. Butit is designed to disappear. As the you browse the Web, the impermanenceagent replaces Noah's story with snippets of text and images from yourbrowsing, until, finally, the story is completely retold in the words ofwhat you have been reading and looking at, with only the structure of theoriginal story left behind.
The Artist as Reliable Archivist: Road to Victory
Museums have always told stories, but there has not always been theopportunity to counter or play with them. For his recent project for theMuseum of Modern Art, Road to Victory, Fred Wilson researched the MOMA'sarchives for several years and then used the Web to juxtapose differentstories the museum has told over the years.
In the first frame of the project, Wilson quotes A. Conger Goodyearfrom 1932
For Wilson, over time , MOMA had lost a certain social agenda, whichit had originally intended. He wrote about the project:
"These archival photographs expose the museum's use of didacticmaterial to persuade the public of its liberal point of view as well asits aesthetic ideas."
Interestingly, in the very same press release that quotes Wilson, thepr speak about the project demonstrates it exactly and, presumably, unwittingly.
"Fred Wilson's online project, Road to Victory (1999)--titled afterthe Museum's 1942 exhibition that included photographs of the United Statesat war--explores The Museum of Modern Art's memory of itself: namely, theinstitution's photographic archive. Constructing narratives through juxtapositionsand connections between documentary images and text borrowed from the archive,Wilson reveals much of what, though visible, is not on display: the Museum'svisitors, staff, exhibition graphics, and wall texts."15
Dump Your Trash_Shred the Web!
And then there is the trash heap. Sometimes you just need to get ridof something, to forget about it once and for all. Both Joachim Blank�sDump Your Trash and Mark Napier�s Digital Landfill provide at least a psychicoutlet for this human need.
1 Earlier versions of this paper were given at the ISEA-sponsored Cartographiesconference in a session "Conserving and Archiving Digital Work,"as well as at the Montreal Festival of New Cinema and New Media, 1999.It is version 3.0 of an ongoing investigation. See http://www.walkerart.org/gallery9/dietz/memory_archive_database/
2 Nam June Paik, "Expanded Education for the Paper-Less Society"(Feb. 1968), in Judson Rosebush, ed., Nam June Paik: Videa 'n' Videology,1959-1973. Syracuse, New York: Everson Museum of Art, 1974.
3 Arguably, the "pigeon-holes" for manuscripts at the Libraryof Alexandria were the forerunners of todayÕs automated informationsystems (see Canfora), but the first systematic attempts at computerizedmuseum information automation were only in the 1970s.
4 Hal Foster, "The Archive Without Museums," October 77 (Summer1996)
5 Steven Johnson, Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms theWay We Create and Communicate (San Francisco, CA: Harper, 1997).
6 Simon Nora and Alain Minc, The Computerization of Society: A Reportto the President of France (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1979).
7 Leo Steinberg. Other Criteria : Confrontations With Twentieth-CenturyArt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972.
8 Brett Stalbaum (et al), Interview with Manuel Delanda, Switch (3:3).http://switch.sjsu.edu:/web/v3n3/DeLanda/delanda.html
9 Alan Sekula, "The Body and the Archive," October 39
10 "Cartographies," symposium sponsored by ISEA, Montreal,October 14, 1999
11 Eugene Thacker, "Bioinformatics," Ctheory 63 (28 October98)
12 Victoria Vesna, "AI & Society Database Aesthetics,"http://time.arts.ucla.edu/AI_Society/vesnaintro.html
13 Eduardo Kac, "Time Capsule." http://www.ekac.org/timec.html
14 Sawad Brooks and Beth Stryker, "DissemiNET." http://disseminet.walkerart.org/html/gallerycredits.html
15 "WEB SITE FEATURING TWO ONLINE PROJECTS ACCOMPANIES THE MUSEUMAS MUSE: ARTISTS REFLECT AT THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART" http://www.moma.org/docs/press/1999/fF_PO02,c8161,.htm
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