| PHILIP POCOCK documentary datatectures |
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2005 DATOID WILDERNESS
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 Katie Spicer Photos |
 Steve Dietz Photos |
 Sarah Cook Photos |
 Open Video Database |
 The Mind Can Not Rest On Anything CAM |
Open Storage Room - Unmovie, Banff. A mirror that goes back in time. And one that moves like an arrow - open source storage. In Banff, Unmovie opened its video database to annotations by users so that it bends (like the Stage) Unmovie's Stream. |
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IN A DATOID WILDERNESS by Philip Pocock For Database Imaginary exhibition curated by Sarah Cook, Steve Dietz, Anthony Kiendl at Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff, Canada 13.11.2004 28-01-2005 IN A DATOID WILDERNESS - www.unmovie.net Off/On, 0/1 represent the phenomenological units of digital space at root level At experiential levels, in new media - digitally negotiated environments - the unit dimensions multiply to read/write, closed/open He uttered these strange words: Open, Sesame! And forthwith appeared a wide doorway in the face of the rock. [1] With this login crack, Ali Baba opened and entered a cavernous cache stocked by 40 thieves. Open house! As allegory, Ali Babas cave neighbors Platos. [2] Both caves depict reality as the space of collected delusions and illusions. However, Platos cave acts as metaphor for a world intent on keeping its subjects in the dark, imprisoned by a shadowy perception of the world outside without access to any sunlit sources. Ali Baba has access to both appearances and sources, perceptions of data as currency realized in exchange with the outside world. To take both allegories a step further; two virtual caves or caches, lodged in digital data space would have Platos cave dweller as user, spectating and reading in a closed data space, able to react but not interact in a meaningful manner. Ali Baba, with open access to and exchange between storage and sources, is a performer, a participant in digital data space. The Plato platform, the base for new media Modernism, captures its users desire for transcendence, which passivity hopes for, with perceptions resembling data on the surface, and doubtfully so. When the user transcends, new media Modernism wins the day, but only the day. In a new media Modernist scenario, data displaying only their surfaces are more precisely termed datoids, to update in an age of digitally networked environments, Norman Mailers 1973 neologism factoids: "facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or a newspaper, creations which are not so much lies as products to manipulate emotions in the Silent Majority." Datoids settle in digital media that are primarily read-only. Datoids are mapped onto CD- and DVD ROMs (Read-Only-Memory), published as static HTML pages, directed with authoring tools such as the Macromedia Director Lingo mix. To be data in a networked environment, in post-1990 new media, datas key quality is an inherently open source. Digital data, were it material pigment on a painting surface, would remain in process at its source, a wet fluid openly encouraging observant engagement and participation. Experiences in participation at source levels defines data inscribed in new media nowadays, and that supposes reading and writing. After all, the nomadology of new media presupposes that humankind is not a spectator at heart or in mind, but a performer interacting in a fluid environment. [3] It is performing and not spectating and collaborating for consumption, which explains the survival of our strange species in a natural world, wherein the only known constant is eventual extinction. Datoids identify their users with the devices they hold mice by permitting them access only to the secondary, surface attributes of the data which datoids dubiously resemble. Just as data which cannot perform are stray and datoid, humans who cannot realize their inborn performativity are inter-reactive and humanoid in character, in touch only with characteristics of data surfaces. That searching, sorting, scanning, selecting, showing, styling and screening datoids ought to suffice the user as interaction is simply a swindle. With no source in sight, no sorcery is possible. Missing datas core attribute, interaction acts outlandishly as a misnomer for interreaction. The absence of open sources chains the user to a role as consumer/spectator/reader, connecting to and navigating data surfaces, which systemically contributes to the ironic conscription of ontologically open digital data space to become the ubiquitous representative of geo space. And in its wake, or even along with its conscription, globalization becomes the mindset to resist. The project of globalization is keyed upon the closure of data sources. As opposed to post-1990 new medias natural proclivity toward translocality as paradigm, globalizations socio-economic homogenization is abetted by the datoid mythologizing which adherents to new media Modernism prop up. Much to the glee of mass media moguls, their savvy mediology engineers, and those on The Board, as Bill Burroughs [4] called conspiring para-Pentagons on this planet, new media Modernists share, albeit benignly, an antipathy to the potential arbitrariness of an open system, eschewing apparent chaos, which is in fact a slowly self-organizing neutral process, Supermodern [5] in its pursuit of process rather than. New media Modernist advocates as well as The Boards most resistant fear is an open system, and a collaborative paradigm for the unfolding of cultural objects in a times taking, collective procession en route to translocal tolerance via contact and exchange. Closed source datoid space updates the processing speed of progress and alienation that already exploded once in the late Modernist Age, and from those ashes the digital phoenix, a pterodactyl perhaps, of data space arose around 1990, unfolding an array of instinctively participatory media forms enabling consensual communication, shared information and collaborative production processes, a signpost still up ahead marking a natural exit point from Modernism once and for all. Navigating glowing datoid surfaces of digital space may stubbornly and spellbindingly distract and concoct some clever, elegant and almost always labyrinthine illusion of interaction. Newfangled datoid illusions additionally complicate, however entertainingly, the constant denial of exchange, which has invariably typified the Modernist program throughout the twentieth century, according to architect Bernard Tschumi.[6] The Modernist paradigm administers many quarters in new media circles, applauded by the mass media elite, looking to renew tired cinema and tv strategies and tropes, by extending into digital negotiated environments in the twenty-first century "the founding principle of modernism in the twentieth century: the triumphant annihilation of cultural memory"[7], which has fueled Modernisms legendary thirst for progress toward Wasteland already for a century. There persists a sizeable, stubbornly vocal and visible set of new media Modernists practicing and authoring an aesthetic update in digital space of Modernisms early program in the time-based arts of the last century. In this regard notably, returning to Russian Formalist narrative theory [8], the classical syuzhet dimension, plot scenarios, dislocated from what is now a radically new fabula or fable, is being thoroughly dissected by new media Modernists continuing to work like early filmmakers with read-only memory, albeit digital memory such as CD- and DVD ROM. Syuzhet cannot be unlinked from its motivating fabula. When they are divorced, syuzhet permutations are cosmetic, Mannerist like melodrama, marking only the surface residuals of reactions. A narratives fabula, the syuzhets driver, is an imaginary space belonging not to the plot of a work, but to its human spectator/reader. In post-1990 new media that spectator/reader is simultaneously a participant/performer, which radically rethinks what a fabula is, and in turn, how it affects any set of associated syuzhet scenarios which, in meaningfully interactive space conflates plot with complot. Formalistic new media Modernism, unrooted in the current epoch, promotes stylistics over actual formal concerns, which are invariably and necessarily rooted in a present cultural moment, not the past. Read-Only-Memory surrogates for narrative interaction, despite their sometimes overwhelming digital effects, amount to feeble attempts to validate the undesirable, unthinkable negation of digital data space as inextricable from the current translocal network context. Like the limited efficiency offered by multiple choice testing, Read-Only-Memory authoring rebuffs even a modicum of subjective intuition, and sidetracks the single unique attribute that technological invention has opened in digital space since 1990, namely, its openness, from playing more than a cameo role in the procession of new media art and experimentation. Post-1990 new media does not only require new technology to be advocated as new. It requires a radically new aesthetic, and the emergence of a new paradigm, (from thingness to isness, perhaps), a participatory paradigm that encourages experimental forms of cultural production to emerge, ones that echo in their embodiments the nucleus of the new technologies they employ, utterly radical forms dealing with current situations, that do not grasp at past Modernist straws for validation of future trends, thereby, leaving the present tense out of the new media art equation. Supermodern data space development, an aesthetic corollary to post-1990 new media technology inventions intervenes, in concert with the intuitive identification of and interactive engagement with the emerging core attributes innate to new aesthetic technologies, to cause flows of subjectively affective, translocally turbulent forms at once through openly dislocated, neutrally multi-purposed and exquisitely programmed new media technologies. New media Modernists turn away from these signposts in contemporary thought, there are many [9], concerning openness in media, access to sources, participation in the collaborative construction of culture, issues that percolate a sometimes deserved skepticism toward new media as representing just another program of Modernism throughout the contemporary art world and the general cultural discourse that debates a participatory translocalist paradigm over the inevitability of a globalization which the absence of open sources in negotiated data space is capable of speeding along. Neo-liberal new media Modernists view such considerations as being wholly nave, irrational, even absurdly Stalinist. [10] Datoid aesthetics, their spectators distracted by labyrinthine technicolor displays that simulate performance by presenting possibilities for illusionist projection onto the work, but not into it, are guided by navigation strategies alone through essentially closed read-only memories masquerading at times as a database, when in fact, the data is not open but burned to CD or DVD ROM. After all, ROMs are archiving media, not database media, a crucial distinction new media Modernists either miss or choose to ignore, much to the delight of The Board. As an archive, CD and DVD ROM, all Read-Only-Memory represent only the sentiment of anarchy, which Derrida laments in his essay Mal dArchive [12] to be diametrically opposite to the archive. An archive can never be unruly or an-archic, the word archive stemming from the Greek arkh, rule, the arkhon, the archivist, impersonating the ruler. Clever, compelling, at times transcending works by Read-Only-Memorists dazzle their publics into retaining the Modernist passive posture required for the well-known illusion to work. When the subject, in subjecting herself to the authority of the author, transcends, there is a pay off, but a price as well. Should new media Modernists cultivate more information users than participants, information, not the public, will win the information revolution. [11] New media Modernists admonish any calculation of participation with open data sources as sinking into the arbitrary, spawning irrational media as a result, and their public agrees, preferring a digital extension to the comfortable passive paradigm mass media has, for the already satisfied, settled them into. Numb to or passively ignoring their most basic intuitions as a public, they are trained to filter, as if it were noise, the intrinsic embodiments of post-1990 new media, open systems, that, by design or happenstance, open Platos Cave, naturally encouraging shared access to sources in the artificial sunlight of backlit screens and along with it, the painstaking potency of self-organizing, probabilistic participation in the procession of cultural objects and appearances, immaterial or otherwise. When data have lost touch with their sources, they are like orphans, abandoned, soon forgotten. When found somewhere along the Infobahn wayside, or eking out a half-life on some cyburban periphery as datoids, they may be adopted by surrogates for their sources and get admitted to databanks, not bases. Enter, the archivist! A base, however, implies an architecture that depends on input to replenish its sources for survival, i.e. an Antarctic base. A bank is an architecture that secures more and more sources in order to succeed in an environment. In a datoid wilderness, Unmovie.net [13] plays with the Modernist paradigm of new media, its datoid objects and its inter-reacting users, all at once, poetically. As a ubiquitous Internet video, streaming since 10.11.2002, 24-hours-a-day, 7-days-a-week, the Net video data adopted by Unmovies open video database have been cut from their native online sources and stored as anonymous orphans, video datoids. Acting as surrogate sources, Unmovie participants caption in their own words the found video data found in the Unmovie video database. The descriptive language attached to each video influences its chances of being called up by the script being improvised at the Unmovie.net Stage, where dialogue is scanned for emerging keywords. Should a keyword from the Stage match a word describing a Net video culled into and captioned in the Unmovie video database, its a match, and the corresponding video is cued to a play list, soon to be displayed at Unmovie.nets Stream online. And so it goes unendingly. Pure time. Existence time. Open time. The Unmovie.net Stage as well opens the audience/spectator question in late Modernist discourse to new interpretations. Unmovie.nets guests arriving from anywhere, therwhere, are cast on the Unmovie Stage alongside five actor-media personalities, in computer jargon, software or chat bots, programmed with highly artificial intelligence to, at stochastically controlled intervals, avoid conversation and scoot away to some unoccupied space on the Unmovie Stage, or alternately to search out a dialogue partner, then dock, talk and listen. Their dialogue is converted from text-to-speech, passing through auditory emotion filters, and streamed from the Stage as mp3 sound. On the Stage, guests interact with the bots, like a bot. There is a difference however. Unmovie.net Stage guests have open access to and affect the bots brains, that is, the text files that bots draw upon to drive their dialogue in conversation with other bots or online human guests. If a guest docks and talks to a bot or with a conversing group of bots at Unmovie.nets Stage, that bot or the group of bots addressed by the guest interlocutor remember what it was that guest said, adding that address to their own brain or brains. Each bot, opening its personality at the source, is constantly acquiring the input of fresh words and syntax uttered in dialogue exchanges by human online guests on Stage. Fresh input means fresh output; bots drawing on guest text they have in memory in future conversations, potentially matching the texts annotating videos in the database, which stirs up the playlist pot and results in an ever-fresh Unmovie.net Stream. Datatecture is the compound word Unmovie fields to signify the algorithmic architecture it embodies, one foot firmly in virtual space and the other, more tentatively, in some public space, a museum, festival hall, and so on. As fusion of the prefix data and the midfix architecture, datatecture plans procedures for Unmovies Stage and Stream data spaces, in concert with an equally performative, installative environment. At the crossroads of cyberspace and geo space, datatecture is similar in principle to Supermodern architecture, only in reverse. While Supermodernism focuses on an exterior hi-tech aesthetic, datatecture focuses on a situative aesthetic surrounding hi-tech informatics. Coined by Philip Pocock in 1996 for colleague Florian Wenz, the term datatecture digitally updates art approaches investigated by Beat Generation happenings and Situationist psychogeographics. Datatecture oversteps screen surface borders, intertwining real and virtual traces in the present tense, sculpting a zone out of the space between medial and architectural milieu. Datatecture feels responsible for the space not only on screens but between screens, so that data flows may pool but never terminate, no digital device involved becoming a mere terminal. Datatectural net-works such as Unmovie embrace ruinous motifs of dissolution and evanescence that deal the mind-body problem a virtual hand, contesting that there is correspondingly data-matter leakage in space, not memetic but provisional and subjective. These datatectural proposals emerged in 1997 with the Pocock/Wenz/Noll/Huber database cinema experiment A Description of the Equator and Some therLands http://www.aporee.org/equator produced by documenta X. Implied connections between geo and data space were then strengthened cyber-cartographically in a collective program employing a Self-Organizing Mapping algorithm, hacked and transposed from its source as the brainchild of Finnish mathematician Kohonen, by another team assembled by Pocock, h|u|m|b|o|t http://www.humbot.org incorporated in sync with a sprawling site in net_condition at ZKM Karlsruhe in 1999. Unmovie, ØtherLands, h|u|m|b|o|t, datatectures all, perform poetically as dwelling connotes. Each asks ex-audiences to step across the mass media boundary and perform, not self-consciously as Modernism foresaw, but interactively in a net-work online and on the ground. Some may dare to hypernarrate as collaborators, co-travelers if you will, at access nodes in the data space displayed, or at probabilistic moments within the data flow participating in and @ real and virtual public space at once. Unmovie, like datatecture generally, acts on the premise that in an age of information, information becomes valid material for art. And as open source, information enfolds anyone in its chaosmos. Aesthetically, datatecture shares a double, uncanny familiarity with ruins as imaginary memory containers. Both datatectures virtual and material components decompose, with a hyperspeed unknown to pre-digital histories. Installation materials are generally chucked after each site-specific show, only a few souvenirs surviving to be possibly evidenced in subsequent installations. Datatecture code and its malleable data sources are also subject to rapid change, software aging and refurbishment, burying certain views and paths, while chancing alternates. Unmovie exemplifies datatectures apparent open end itself. Its nunc fluens, time-imaging online stream greets its guests invariably in the middle. Access is also permitted right down datas middles, straight to and from their sources. Unmovie, and datatecture for that matter, are time monads, all middle. Coming and going does take place, but less chronologically and more performatively as existence time naturally presents its experiences to us. Datatectural notions are inspirations for architects to locate new time frames for dwelling, as the informatic facades realize in Supermodernist architecture. Datatecture and Supermodern architecture are corollary, recalling Ur building qualities underplayed or unbuilt for ages. Literally coded into the infinitive, to build, at its source, is the German, bauen, to build, from which ich bin and du bist, I am and you are stem tale-tellingly, through the old German notion of buan, to dwell. Heidegger has pointed out decades ago that to build is to be. Datatecture is a space for being a digital performer. And Unmovie is an instance of this. Collectively, its data streams its way past the new media Moderns, weaving around classical Postmodernist and Modernist paradigms, even underneath datas accepted definition as things given, when the Latins took Euclids treatise titled Data at its very word, as denoting anonymous associates of facts, granted and admitted, to locate its watershed at datas own data source in Vedic Sulba Sutras, when data meant a double entendre, binding poetic and perfunctory qualities of space mnemonically in the ongoing procession of data. [14] Compiled by Philip Pocock for unmovie.net 28.09.2004. [1] Al Baba and the 40 Thieves, The Arabian Nights, Sir Burtons trans. 1888 http://www.arabiannights.org/index2.html . [2] Plato, For those imprisoned in the cave The truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images. The Allegory of the Cave, The Republic Book VII, 2350 B.C.E., http://www.gutenberg.net/etext/1497 . [3] "A group of schizophrenics who share their illusions may get along with each other pretty well; they are, however, utterly unfit to react and adapt themselves to real outside situations, and this is precisely the reason why they are put into the asylum. Or, in terms of Plato's simile: the prisoners in the cave do not see the real things but only their shadows; but if they are not only looking at the spectacle, but have to take part in the performance, the shadows must, in some way, be representative of the real things. It seems to be the most serious shortcoming of classic occidental philosophy, from Plato to Descartes to Kant, to consider man primarily as a spectator, as ens cogitens, while, for biological reasons, he has essentially to be a performer, an ens agens in the world he is thrown in." Ludwig von Bertalanffy, The Relativity of Categories, in General System Theory, pub. George Braziller, New York, 1968. [4] For The Board - The Elite - The Initiates - Are these the words of the all-powerful boards and syndicates of the earth? These are the words of liars cowards collaborators traitors. Liars who want time for more lies, Cowards who can not face your "dogs" your "gooks" your "errand boys" your "human animals" with the truth. Collaborators with Insect People with Vegetable People. With any people anywhere who offer you a body forever. William S. Burroughs, Nova Express, Grove Press, 1964. [5] See Hans Ibelings, SUPERMODERNISM: Architecture in the Age of Globalization, NAi, Rotterdam, 1998. Ibelings defines Supermodernism as a sort of post-postmodernism, a tech-inspired aesthetic movement that reacts against heavy-handed, '80s-era pomo and deconstruction, and adopts the philosophy of computer product design. Structures appear portable and therefore disconnected from their surroundings. As with computers, all the detail is inside, while exteriors are neutral and unassuming. Paul Spinrad, WIRED 9.07, July 2001. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.07/streetcred.html?pg=8 [6] in Louis Martin, Interdisciplinary Transpositions: Bernard Tschumis Architectural Theory, in The Anxiety of Interdisciplinarity, de-,dis-,ex-, 1998. [7] Benjamin Buchloh, Memory Lessons and History Tableaux: James Colemans Archaeology of Spectacle, in James Coleman, OCTOBER Files, MIT Press, 2003. [8] Victor Shklovsky, The connection between devices of Syuzhet construction and general stylistic devices, 1919. [9] "What we have to develop is what sometimes appears under the slightly ridiculous name 'interactivity': the consumer responds immediately when he is interrogated, intervening to ask his own questions, reorient the discourse, propose new rules. But all of this is done to such a feeble degree! It doesn't even come close to what we would like to see, namely, for addressees to be able to transform, in their turn, what reaches them, the 'message,' or to understand how it is made, and how it is produced, in order to restart the contract on different terms. Of course we're never going to achieve some kind of symmetry or reciprocity. This mirage, that the addressee might reappropriate what reaches him, is a fantasy. But this is no reason to abandon the addressee to passivity and not to militate for all forms, summary or sophisticated, of the right to response, right of selection, right of interception, and right of intervention. A vast field is open here. I think, moreover, that this development will continue inexorably, at a rhythm that seems incalculable today. Its taking place, it's happening, this relative reappropriation is under way." Jacques Derrida, Topolitics and Teletechnology, Echographies of Television, Polity Press, UK, 2002. [10] In contrast, as a post-communist subject, I cannot but see Internet as a communal apartment of Stalin era: no privacy, everybody spies on everybody else, always present line for common areas such as the toilet or the kitchen. Or I can think of it as a giant garbage site for the information society, with everybody dumping their used products of intellectual labor and nobody cleaning up. Or as a new, Mass Panopticum (which was already realized in communist societies) -- complete transparency, everybody can track everybody else. ON TOTALITARIAN INTERACTIVITY (notes from the enemy of the people) http://www.manovich.net/TEXT/totalitarian.html 1996 [11] "Information plays on its ineffectiveness in order to establish its power, its very power is to be ineffective, and thereby all the more dangerous. this is why it is necessary to go beyond information... going beyond information is achieved on two sides at once, towards two questions: 'what is the source and what is the addressee?" Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, University of Minnesota Press, 1989. [12] Jacques Derrida, Mal dArchive: Une Impression Freudienne, Galilee, Paris, 1995. [13] http://www.unmovie.net 2002 Unmovie is participatory hypermedia featuring a multi-user flash/python weblication. Bots (AI personalities) and online participants find themselves cast as synthespian actor-media, collaborating as screenwriting poets on the Unmovie Stage. Presently, the botcast includes: dogen (13th C. Zenmaster teaching); nietzsche (Friedrich Nietzsches Beyond Good and Evil); geisha (an androgenous cyberlovers' chat transcript), tark (Andre Tarkovskys Sculpting in Time); and, dylan (Bob Dylan, his complete song lyrics). The log of their unending conversations acts as the Unmovie hyperscript. While scenes crystallize on Stage, keywords emerge and query Unmovies Net-video database to refresh the playlist driving the Unmovie Stream ongoing since 10.11.2002. [14] Here is an actual sutra of spiritual content, as well as secular mathematical significance. 'gopi bhagya madhuvrata srngiso dadhi sandhiga khala jivita khatava gala hala rasandara The translation is as follows:O Lord anointed with the yogurt of the milkmaids' worship (Krishna), O savior of the fallen, O master of Shiva, please protect me. At the same time this verse directly yields the decimal equivalent of pi divided by 10: pi/10 = 0.31415926535897932384626433832792. by setting a numerical value of 0 through 9 for Sanskrit consonant sets. http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/7348/math.html |