<nettime-ann> Zagreb: How To Do Things With Data

[Geert Lovink <geert@xs4all.nl>]

.
> http://www.whw.hr/
> http://www.kulturnikapital.org/OrganisationsEn/WhatHowAndForWhom
>
> How to do things with data
> a dataesthetics discussion forum
>
>
> Nov 30 2006.
>
> 7 pm- 10 pm
>
> Cinema Mosor, Zvonimirova 63, Zagreb
>
> Participants: Léonore Bonaccini  i Xavier Fourt/ Bureau d’études, 
> Aaron Gach/ Center for Tactical Magic, Miran Mohar i Borut Vogelnik / 
> IRWIN, Trevor Paglen, Naeem Mohaiemen
>
> ##########
>
> Dataesthetics
>
> A group show @ Gallery Nova
> Teslina 7, Zagreb, Croatia
> Dec 12 2006-Jan 6 2007
>
> Opening Friday, 1.12.2006, 8 PM
>
> The Atlas Group, Jean - Pierre Aubé, Martha Rosler, Bureau d’études, 
> Mark Lombardi, Center for Tactical Magic, IRWIN, Trevor Paglen, Marko 
> Peljhan/I-TASC, Bálint Szombathy, Mladen Stilinovi, Visible Collective 
> (Mohaiemen, Roy, Huq, Lin, Nimoy, et al)
>
> Curated by: Stephen Wright
>
> ########
>
> Data has become the most pervasive – and intangibly invasive – feature 
> of contemporary life; of life become data. Life systems have been the 
> object of sustained data gathering since the time of the 
> Enlightenment, and cartography, flow charts, graphs and statistica; 
> databases have played a preponderant role in the shift from a society 
> based on discipline to contemporary regimes of biopolitical control, 
> where information is inseparable from the exercise of power. Though it 
> is still commonly held that “the map is not the territory” – that is, 
> that life can neither be confused with nor certainly reduced to its 
> informational content – the vast expansion in data gathering 
> facilitated by digital nano-technologies and integrated networks 
> suggests that a qualitative transformation in governance may become 
> possible through the sheer quantity of available data. Is the dream of 
> total management on the verge of becoming a reality, whereby action on 
> the map is at the same time action on the territory? “You have nothing 
> to fear if you have nothing to hide” has become the chorus of 
> real-information ideologues; yet to be an individual is to have 
> something to hide…
>
> Artists have only comparatively recently come to take a sustained 
> interest in the phenomenon of information display, classification, 
> compiling – in short, in what might be referred to as dataesthetics. 
> This exhibition brings together twelve artists and artist collectives 
> who use data as their artistic material. Working with cognitive 
> mapping, discursive form, or envisaging knowledge production and 
> research as a full-fledged artistic practice (rather than a prelude to 
> producing artwork), these artists seek to foreground the heuristic and 
> socially critical potential of data use.
>
> Plainly, such practices have precedents in the conceptual art 
> producers of an earlier generation, sharing with them a broad critique 
> of administered lives, bureaucratised minds and instrumental 
> rationality. Of course, the aesthetics of data is not merely about 
> ordering facts and figures; it is equally about disorganising and 
> subverting the rational arrangement of information and our reliance on 
> databases. Dataesthetics seeks to foreground some of the most 
> cutting-edge practices in the field of research-based art while at the 
> same time anchoring them in an art-historical framework. From this 
> perspective, it can be argued that the data-based practices of many 
> contemporary artists give conceptual art the opportunity to 
> potentially reinvent itself, giving it an unforeseen use value, by 
> injecting artistic competence into collaborative initiatives beyond 
> the confines of the artworld.
>
> Dataesthetics is a three-phrase project, comprising an exhibition, a 
> discussion forum with the artists and the publication of a bilingual 
> reader, featuring critical writings by theorists and artists working 
> in the field of dataesthetics.
>
> Stephen Wright
>
> ***
>
> 30.11.2006. 19 h
>
> cinema Mosor, Zvonimirova 63, Zagreb
>
> How to do things with data
>
> a dataesthetics discussion forum
>
> participants: Léonore Bonaccini  i Xavier Fourt/ Bureau d’études, 
> Aaron Gach/ Center for Tactical Magic, Miran Mohar i Borut Vogelnik / 
> IRWIN, Trevor Paglen, Naeem Mohaiemen /Visible Collective
>
> moderated by : Stephen Wright
>
> Art production long sought to protect the relatively autonomous sphere 
> it had eked out for itself from any incursion by the potentially 
> deadening logic of knowledge production and data gathering and 
> display. In the face of the sheer glut and facile allure of 
> purpose-driven information and rationality, art’s self-assigned role 
> was to affirm its radical uselessness. Yet as knowledge has become 
> inseparable from power, many practitioners have come to see art and 
> art-related activity as an extradisciplinary and even potentially 
> subversive field of inquiry. Though such practices are often described 
> as content-driven, it is perhaps more accurate to consider them in 
> terms of their discursive form. Critical cartography, tactical magic 
> and database use have become integral components of artistic 
> competence, which refuses to leave social critique to the social 
> sciences. Bringing together Aaron Gach of the Center for Tactical 
> Magic, Naeem Mohaiemen of the Visible Collective, Trevor Paglen, 
> Léonore Bonaccini and Xavier Fourt of Bureau d’études and Stephen 
> Wright, the discussion forum will focus on the performative dimension 
> of data-based research and its display – that is, on how to do things, 
> socially critical things, with dataesthetics.
>
> discussion forum participants
>
> Bureau d’etudes
>
> Bureau d’études is a Paris-based media collective founded in 1998, 
> comprised of the artist-duo Léonore Bonaccini and Xavier Fourt. Using 
> complex graphic tables conceived for the Internet, they map various 
> hidden global structures of finance and world governance, formalising 
> patterns and connections through scientific and informational 
> exactitude. Their work can be viewed online at bureaudetudes.free.fr 
> or http://utangente.free.fr/
>
> Aaron Gach is Visiting Faculty in the Design+Technology department at 
> San Francisco Art Institute. He was inspired by studies with a private 
> investigator, a magician, and a ninja to form the Center for Tactical 
> Magic—an organization dedicated to the amalgamation of art, 
> technology, magic, and activism. Working across disciplines—art, 
> design, architecture, and community service—Gach’s collaborations have 
> involved members of the Black Panthers, Earth First!, and the American 
> Red Cross to name a few. www.tacticalmagic.org
>
> IRWIN
>
> IRWIN was founded in 1983 as the visual-arts component of the 
> Slovenian art collective NSK, based in Ljubljana. Together with many 
> collaborators they started a project East Art Map intended to serve as 
> an orientation tool in the still-undefined field of the art of the 
> East. The aim of the East Art Map is to show the art of the entire 
> space of Eastern Europe, to take artists out of their national 
> frameworks and present them in a unified scheme. www.eastartmap.org
>
> Naeem Mohaiemen is a filmmaker and media artist working in New York 
> and Dhaka. His projects include Visible Collective 
> (disappearedinamerica.org), "The Young Man Was No Longer A Terrorist" 
> (Dictionary of War, Mufathalle), and "Muslims or Heretics: My Camera 
> Can Lie?" (UK House of Lords). Essays include "Islamic Roots of 
> Hip-Hop" (Sound Unbound, MIT Press, DJ Spooky ed.), "Terrorists or 
> Guerillas in the Mist" (Sarai 06, part of Documenta 12 journal 
> project) and "Why Mahmud Can't Be a Pilot") (Nobody Passes, Matt 
> Bernstein ed.). disappearedinamerica.org
>
> Trevor Paglen is an artist, writer, and experimental geographer 
> working out of the Department of Geography at the University of 
> California, Berkeley. His work involves deliberately blurring the 
> lines between social science, contemporary art, and a host of even 
> more obscure disciplines in order to construct unfamiliar, yet 
> meticulously researched ways to interpret the world around us. His 
> most recent projects take up secret military bases, the California 
> prison system, and the CIA’s practice of “extraordinary rendition.” 
> www.paglen.com
>
> curator and moderator
>
> Stephen Wright is an art writer and programme director at the Collège 
> international de philosophie (Paris). "Dataesthetics" follows “Rumour 
> as Media” (Aksanat, Istanbul), following “In Absentia” (Passerelle, 
> Brest) and “The Future of the Reciprocal Readymade” (Apexart, NYC), as 
> part of a series of exhibitions examining art practices with low 
> coefficients of artistic visibility, which raise the prospect of art 
> without artworks, authorship or spectatorship.
>
> Dataesthetics is part of the project Zagreb – Cultural Kapital of 
> Europe 3000
>
> http://www.kulturnikapital.org

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