Cory Arcangel, Julian Bleecker, Natalie Bookchin, Kayle Brandon, Heath
Bunting, Alan Currall, Beatriz da Costa, Hans Haacke, Harwood/Mongrel, Agnes
Hegedus, Axel Heide, Pablo Helguera, Lisa Jevbratt/C5, George Legrady, Lev
Manovich, Jennifer + Kevin McCoy, Muntadas, onesandzeros, Scott Paterson,
Philip Pocock, Edward Poitras, David Rokeby, Warren Sack, Jamie Schulte,
Thomson&Craighead, Brooke Singer, Gregor Stehle, University of Openess,
Angie Waller, Cheryl L'Hirondelle Waynohtew, Marina Zurkow
Database Imaginary
Curated by Sarah Cook, Steve Dietz, Anthony Kiendl
"If [with] the arrival of the Web the world appears to us as an endless and
unstructured collection of images, texts, and other data records, it is only
appropriate that we will be moved to model it as a database. But it is also
appropriate that we would want to develop poetics, aesthetics and ethics of
this database."
Lev Manovich (1)
Database Imaginary presents 23 works made by 33 artists between 1971 and 2004. The art projects in this exhibition span a period almost as long as the word database has been in use. It is really only with the rise of
computing and widespread access to vast quantities of organized information
that the term has come to the fore in the popular imagination. The urge to
organize, however, is a longstanding trait of human civilization. In this
sense, Database Imaginary is less about databases than about this cultural moment when they have become ever-present.
Databases structure our economy, our knowledge systems, our security. Yet
these structures serve and are subject to multiple goals and agendas. Our
practical experience of databases in westernized societies suggest access
not just to information about the world, but the world痴 access to
information about us. We are the objects of databases: a phone number to
market to, a credit risk, a questionable border-crosser.
As artist and theorist Lev Manovich suggests, for such an ubiquitous cultural form � just as was the case with the automobile, skyscrapers, even
perspective � we need to imagine the possibilities of databases; to actively
shape them and participate in how they are used to organize the world we
live in. The artists and artworks in Database Imaginary warn, astound, and challenge us to understand database culture as a pervasive aspect of our contemporary environment and our lived experience. Databases present us with
a series of choices. Artist Edward Poitras suggests such choices involve negotiating missing information, misinformation and new information. It is up to us to choose whether or not and how to engage.
All the artists in Database Imaginary engage imaginatively with the organization of data through their use of aesthetic, conceptual, social and
political strategies. As artists Jon Thomson & Alison Craighead say, 釘y placing the viewer centrally, she joins the pieces together that are often un-related...Our interest is in visualizing things about our experience of such a huge networked space like the web. It痴 about bringing some sense of
order to a tumbling database for a moment and then seeing it fall back to
disarray.�
(i) Lev Manovich (1998) "Database As a Symbolic Form"
www.manovich.net/DOCS/database.rtf
This exhibition was co-organized by the Dunlop Art Gallery, Regina Public
Library, and made possible with funding from The Canada Council for the
Arts, the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science and Technology,
Canadian Heritage (Museums Assistance Program), and the Alberta Foundation
for the Arts.
Evidence Mounts That The Vote May Have Been Hacked
by Thom Hartmann
When I spoke with Jeff Fisher this morning (Saturday, November 06, 2004), the Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Florida's 16th District said he was waiting for the FBI to show up. Fisher has evidence, he says, not only that the Florida election was hacked, but of who hacked it and how. And not just this year, he said, but that these same people had previously hacked the Democratic primary race in 2002 so that Jeb Bush would not have to run against Janet Reno, who presented a real threat to Jeb, but instead against Bill McBride, who Jeb beat.
"It was practice for a national effort," Fisher told me.
And some believe evidence is accumulating that the national effort happened on November 2, 2004.
The State of Florida, for example, publishes a county-by-county record of votes cast and people registered to vote by party affiliation. Net denizen Kathy Dopp compiled the official state information into a table, available at http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm, and noticed something startling.
Also See:
Florida Secretary of State Presidential Results by County 11/02/2004 (.pdf)
Florida Secretary of State County Registration by Party 2/9/2004 (.pdf)
While the heavily scrutinized touch-screen voting machines seemed to produce results in which the registered Democrat/Republican ratios largely matched the Kerry/Bush vote, in Florida's counties using results from optically scanned paper ballots - fed into a central tabulator PC and thus vulnerable to hacking the results seem to contain substantial anomalies.
In Baker County, for example, with 12,887 registered voters, 69.3% of them Democrats and 24.3% of them Republicans, the vote was only 2,180 for Kerry and 7,738 for Bush, the opposite of what is seen everywhere else in the country where registered Democrats largely voted for Kerry.
In Dixie County, with 9,676 registered voters, 77.5% of them Democrats and a mere 15% registered as Republicans, only 1,959 people voted for Kerry, but 4,433 voted for Bush.
The pattern repeats over and over again - but only in the counties where optical scanners were used. Franklin County, 77.3% registered Democrats, went 58.5% for Bush. Holmes County, 72.7% registered Democrats, went 77.25% for Bush.
Yet in the touch-screen counties, where investigators may have been more vigorously looking for such anomalies, high percentages of registered Democrats generally equaled high percentages of votes for Kerry. (I had earlier reported that county size was a variable this turns out not to be the case. Just the use of touch-screens versus optical scanners.)
ToDo #1457: Phrase one of your fundamental beliefs in soaring oratory.
[Barack Obama's] address to the Democratic convention put him on the political map and started tongues wagging bout the possibility of the first black U.S. president.
It included a call to end divisions in the country. "There's not a liberal America and a conservative America - there's the Unisted States of America," he said in the kind of soaring oratory absent from the recent election campaign. "There's not a black American and a white America and Latino America and Asian America - there's the United States of America."
He also thrilled the delegates by saying that "if there's a child on the South Side who can't read, that matters to me, even if ti's not my child. If there's an Arab-American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties. It's that fundamental belief - I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper - that makes this country work." The Globe and Mail, "Next up: Barack veruss Jeb?" November 6, 2004, F3
"Using County-by-County election return data from USA Today together with County boundary data from the US Census' Tiger database we produced the following graphic depicting the results. Of course, blue is for the democrats, red is for the republicans, and green is for all other. Each county's color is a mix of these three color components in proportion to the results for that county."
The problem with all the jokes is that Bush won. And while Michael Moore claims that it was the narrowest margin of victory for a sitting president since Woodrow Wilson, he won resoundingly. He carried more than 50% of the popular vote. Republicans picked up seats in both the Senate and House and knocked off Tom Daschle. 11 states voted to ban gay marriage. etc. etc. etc. It was not a good night.
In the next 4+ years Bush is likely to pick the next Supreme Court Chief Justice, institute a de facto draft to combat the quagmire we (yes we) have created in the Middle East, continue to deride civil liberties while smirking about a State of Constant Terror, assault the environment in the guise of energy independence, continue to throw $ at his once and future buddies, and all the while claim to be a uniter not a divider.
And a majority of voting Americans voted for him.
We should laugh. We should wonder who are those "other" Americans (us). But jokes and incredulous smugness will not change a thing.
I don't know how to change things, but I do know that every time I heard Kerry try and out Bush Bush, I cringed. I do not challenge that tactically Kerry had to do what he had to do. And if Kerry was close, Dean would have been annihalated. Nader wasn't even a gadfly.
But the problem, I think, was not spineless candidates and a sheepish, blind electorate. The problem is that there was no ability to speak truth to power in this past election.
How do we create a climate of discourse in the face of such overwhelming certainty on all sides?
ToDO #1459: Consider. If you had just won a heated battle with your partner / best friend / sibling, what would be the quickest way to lose your hard-fought "capital?"
Date: Tue, 2 Nov 2004 10:32:19 +0000
From: Beryl Graham
Subject: [NEW-MEDIA-CURATING] Data and Art: November Theme of the Month
To: NEW-MEDIA-CURATING@JISCMAIL.AC.UK
In a recent informal conversation between CRUMB and artist Graham
Harwood, it was noted that one of the crucial moments missing from any
historical contextualisation of new media art is the point at which we
all started to deal with more and more data in our daily lives. He
commented that what was needed was not a gallery designed for the
exhibition of new media art, but a space - whether gallery or not -
where we can, in his words experience information.
How do curators deal with the aesthetics of data and artists' attempts
to transform information into knowledge?
Lev Manovich claims that "... as the practice of Cardiff and Libeskind shows, it is at the interactions of the physical space and the data that some of the most amazing art of our time is being created." But is physical space compatible with disembodied data? Can data be embodied in a space? What would a space for the experience of
information be like?
Reference: Manovich, Lev (2003) The poetics of augmented space. In:
John Caldwell and Anna Everett (eds.) New media: Practices of
digitextuality. New York: Routledge. p. 90.
N.B. This month we are diverging slightly by not having invited
respondents. The debate, as usual, is open to everyone, so please do
chip in!
The opening of Database Imaginary at the Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Centre is Saturday, November 13 at 7:00 pm (MST). Join us at the opening reception where drinks will be served as part of a performance by Swipe (Beatriz da Costa, Jamie Schulte and Brooke Singer).
Swipe is a project that addresses both current data-collection practices and the uses of data, in order to promote understanding and debate, through a performance, an installation and an online toolkit. Swipe takes the act of capturing data from drivers licenses - a form of data-collection used by businesses and government alike - as a starting point. Bars and convenience stores were early adopters of license scanning technology for age and ID verification. These businesses, however, admit they reap huge benefits from this practice beyond catching underage drinkers and smokers with fake IDs. With one swipe - that often occurs without notification or consent by the cardholder - a business acquires data that can be used to build a valuable consumer database free of charge. Swipe illustrates how this information is used and why businesses and government crave it. Swipe is not only concerned with the individual ("That bar has a record of my name, address and drinking habits."), but also with understanding databases as a discursive, organizational practice and an essential technique of power in today's social field.
The stage for the Swipe performance is a customized, freestanding bar, which serves alcohol. The Swipe bar is a contemporary design stocked with standard bar equipment and goods, but also has additional unique features like an automated drivers license scanner, LCD monitor and a hacked cash register that prints unusual receipts for its customers.
People who approach the bar in search of a refreshing drink will be asked by a bartender (Swipe member) to show a drivers license for age verification. The bartender not only looks at the license, but also places it in an automatic, scanning device. While a bartender prepares the drink order, the Swipe cash register matches the drivers license information with remote and local databases and runs a demographic analysis. Within minutes, a data receipt is ready and is delivered with drink to the customer.
Swipe Beatriz Da Costa, Jamie Schulte and Brooke Singer each bring a variety of specializations, experiences and interdisciplinary interests to their collaborative practice. Da Costa's interests include robotics, bio-tech initiatives and surveillance projects. Her dedication to a participatory cultural practice represents one of the key components of her work. Da Costa recently joined the University of California at Irvine as an Assistant Professor in the new graduate program of Arts, Computation and Engineering. Schulte is an engineer who designs systems that engage human aesthetics, culture and politics. He has been a key collaborator in projects ranging from contestational robotics to video surveillance and interactive installations. Schulte is currently a robotics researcher at Stanford University. Singer is a digital media artist based in Brooklyn. She is Assistant Professor of New Media at the State University of New York, Purchase College.
The problem with all the jokes is that 
The opening of 