Posted by Steve Dietz on September 3, 2004 2:09 PM
The Ars festival continued its rolling opening Thursday with a panel on the "Digital Avant-Garde" - also known as a few of the past Prix Ars Electronica winners - at the Lentos Museum of Modern Art.
Benjamin Weil made the interesting point that when the Prix winners were shown earlier in the year in New York, they hadn't been seen so much by a North American audience and were presented at media-specific institutions: Eyebeam and American Museum of the Moving Image. Presented at Ars again, they are presented in a new context at a contemporary art museum. The only problem is that besides the museum itself, the primary context provided for the works was a xeroxed sheet of paper, which seemed to be printed from the website text, for example regarding Jeffrey Shaw'sLegible City:
"The user can ride a stationary bicycle through a simulated representation of an urban setting consisting of computer-generated letters. The real architecture is replaced by one consisting of text, and the journey through this urban space becomes a literary excursion.
"The texts have been conceived as discrete narratives, each of which has its own specific geographic setting within the urban sphere. Accordingly, the virtual city is a three-dimensional book that can be read in any sequence and in which each person encountering it construes his/her own meaning.
It's not inaccurate, but it seems like a missed opportunity to truly re-contextualize these key works in the history of new media.
This image of Earthç´ city lights was created with data from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) Operational Linescan System (OLS).
The highlight of the day was Brian Holmes's rousing talk "Crisis Cartographies:Stratified Power and the Dynamics of the Swarm" for the Language of Networks conference for which his subtext question was "Is the power law distribution a destiny?" I cannot possibly reproduce his rhetorically powerful argument, but after viewing a NASA map of cities at night, showing primarily the so-called first world lit up and comparing it to a skitter map of more than 11,000 peering sessions globally (showing only one named node in Pretoria for the entire continent of Africa), he suggested that these "raw facts of location and information flow" conformed to traditional (ca. 1992) analyses of centers and peripheries in the world. There appears to be no substantive resistance to the dictates of capital and in light of this, "how do people create free associations" - in both the anarchist and psychoanalytic sense? He then talked about the importance of "weak ties" (most network mapping is coded and deciphered according to the strength of connections). For example, unemployed people find jobs through the "strength of weak ties" - the friend of a friend of a friend. He was arguing that random links (weak ties) can lead individuals outside of their world, and that is a good thing. He also talked about transduction and how stable equilibrium can be altered through the introduction of a singularity. He then analyzed the migration of indymedia software as an example of the success of open source software. This segued into analysis of analyst Thomas Barnett, who was working with both Cantor & Fitzgerald and the Pentagon, the two sites of finance and military attacked by Al Qaeda. The thrust of Barnett's work is to identify a swathe of the world, "the Pentagon's new map" - a "non-integrating gap" roughly analagous to the dark spots on the NASA map or the absense of peering session nodes on the skitter map - where all American interventions have happened since 1980 and where it is important to export security or, as Holmes put it, Barnett argued that the U.S. should "give them networks at the point of a gun." And it is precisely the attempt to subordinate network processes to hierarchical control that has led to such disastrous consequences, such as Afghanistan and Iraq. To paraphrase his reference to Guattari, "what matters is not to represent these events after the fact but how to configure them, how to bring them down to earth." Ending with: "cartography is not just surveying from above / the past, but tracing social dynamics that describe a possible future."
