Museum As Database - Database As Wonder Chamber (Memory-Archive-Database v. 4.0)
January 21, 2000 11:26 PM
Steve Dietz
Museum As Database :: Database As Wonder Chamber
(Memory_Archive_Database v. 4)
Text of a talk given at Fundacio "la Caixa"
January 21, 2000
Museum As Database :: Database As Wonder Chamber
Good evening. I would like to thank the Fundacio "la Caixa" for inviting me here today. It is an honor to speak in this company to you.
In a wonderfully poetic posting to the voti listserv last year, The Ante-Chamber of Revolution: A Prelude to a Theory of Resistance and Maps, Ricardo Dominguez, one of the principals of Electronic Disturbance Theater, wrote
"Several different maps of information have been put on the block for our inspection: frontier, castle, real estate, rhizome, hive, matrix, virus, network,"
and he invites us to "plug in" our own map, saying:
"Each map creates a different line of flight, a different form of security, and a different pocket of resistance."
The map I am going to explore tonight is the database, and it seems to me that not only are the twin poles of security and resistance entirely apropos, but the critical element is the "line of flight" not between them but, orthogonally to them., echoing Manuel Delanda, who wrote:
The artist is that agent (human or not) that takes stratified matter-energy or sedimented cultural materials, and makes them follow a line of flight, or a line of song, or of color.
How do we make databases sing?
But I am getting ahead of my story.
For me, as for many culture workers, databases are indeed a form of security. Most obviously, they are a means of classification, of control. They are also the way things are done in the digital age. They are the norm.
On a personal level, databases are a significant aspect of my job. As director of new media initiatives at the Walker Art Center, a center for contemporary art in the US midwest, part of my mission is to provide access to information about the Walker's collections and other resources.
The major effort in this regard is a collaborative project with a sister institution, The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, called ArtsConnectEd. ACE is essentially a database with an interface oriented to an educational audience. I will not spend much time demoing this project but suffice it to say that there are three aspects for which I hope to provide a broader context during the course of my talk.
It incorporates multiple meda database records - free text, still and moving images, audio, and hypermedia
It works across distinct domains - the museum collection, the library, the archive - each of which, as you know very well, has its own procedures, classification schemes, and mores.
It is pan-institutional. A search will locate relevant results equally for either institution, which otherwise are completely distinct entities, if not direct competitors for audience and funding.
It's pretty cool. It's won some awards. It's also primitive, compared to what will be commonplace in a short while.
The day it launched, we knew ArtsConnectEd had to be revamped. It has already gone through one major transformation based on user testing. This primarily had to with acknowledging how teachers and students actually wanted to use the resource, as opposed to how we institutionally managed the information and/or how we thought they would and even should use it. In my experience, this disconnect between use and design is one of the fundamental problems of any software project, but it is particularly virulent with databases. In a similar way that we often conflate the Internet as a medium of transmission with the Internet as a medium of expression, we often mistake the information museums need to know about their collections - and how they manage it, in databases - with what the public wants to know - and how they access it.
As we consider the next upgrade, the next version of ArtsConnectEd - which I hope will be as radical as the initial transformation of over 50 separate and well-hidden management databases and filing systems into one interconnected, multiple media, cross-domain, pan-institutional, publicly accessible resource - I am trying to understand how to resist, as Ricardo Dominguez might say, this map. How to resist what we already know and therefore think is normal? How to create a map for going where one has not been?
The Wonder Chamber
In this regard, I keep returning to a talk that the media historian Friedrich Kittler gave here in Barcelona in the mid-90s, entitled Museums on the Digital Frontier. "Frontier" is, of course, another one of those maps that Dominguez refers to, and Kittler's talk was intentionally speculative and not a blueprint for the virtual museum. In it, he raised some important issues about whether the database, generically speaking, might not be a way to get back to the idea of the "wonder chamber," before the specialization of the modern museum, circa 1800, when, as Kittler quotes Paul Valery,
sculpture and painting lost their mother, architecture to death. Like orphans, the two arts wandered homeless through the world, until the museum offered them sanctuary.
I cannot represent this talk in detail, but let me share some fragments, which I think are intriguing:
With the rise of the museum as a separate sphere, "technological knowledge was no longer the goal or result of a collection; it now became both its necessary and covert condition."
In other words, the wonder chamber included not only artworks, these were accompanied by marvels of science, technology, and nature. In the modern museum, circa 1800, not only was the display of this technological knowledge banished elsewhere, but it was naturalized and effectively made covert, a technique of display not an object of knowledge. The result, according to Kittler, is hat "the age of wonder chambers has not returned. Instead, side by side with the art museums, countless special technological collections have sprung up." Can the database be that wonder chamber?
The concommitant rise of historiography - hanging paintings at Denon's Louvre or Schinkel's Altes Museum in chronological order - was one such key "technology," "haunting visitors as a ghost or affliction," so that "all they are ultimately left with is the feeling that they have had an experience."
Interestingly, chronology is one of the primary means of sorting a museum database, and as Kittler implies, it all too easily leads to a narrative that seems to make sense in that it is sequential, yet is all too often a story of false comparisons. From another perspective, however, it is one thing to hang galleries chronologically, requiring a physical traversing of the narrative. Part of the functionality of a database, however, is that if the system is well-architected, all sorts of other relationships are discoverable. Which still doesn't mean that they're right, of course, but at least there's the implicit questioning of a single master narrative.
"memory and 'virtualizing'" wipes out an object's "perpetuity." "After this obliteration, all that is left is a throng of data."
A red flag. While we may believe, we may tell ourselves that digitizing a work and transferring it to a database makes it accessible to more than those who can visit physically, think of how "transferring" the Elgin Marbles - to save them - "tore them from their world." We know the database can be a similar rupture, resulting in "just data" - not information, not knowledge, not context, not experience. Just a throng of data. This point is echoed by Hal Foster, who wrote in the essay Museum without Archive
Is there a new dialectics of seeing allowed by electronic information? . . . Art as image-text, as info-pixel? An archive without museums? If so, will this database be more than a base of data, a repository of the given?
Is it possible for the database, to use Suzi Gablik's word, to foster the reenchantment of the work of art?
Kittler: "computer simulations do not merely form user interfaces, they actually constitute a museum." What does this mean? He continues: "More precisely: a museum that ... also functions as a library that has not gone through the modern split between text and images, libraries and galleries."
The computer simulation Kittler was referring to was IBM's recreation of Cluny. By representing a dataset - a database - of Cluny through the interface of a 3D, virtual reality environment, the interface constitutes, literally, a museum. I think there are lots of ways to go with this database-interface-as-museum idea, starting with recognizing that is what's happening. No longer do we have to tromp through Denon's hanging. Through the database interface, we create our own hanging, our own museum - and this does not have to be a representation of a physical space, either. For Kittler, the promising point is that virtual Cluny is like the Library of Alexandria was. It's all there, without the contemporary distinctions between gallery, library, and archive.
Visitors especially "should be given access not just to lovingly presented information but to all available information. . . . For it is the structure of such archives, and not their presentation, that can smash through an elementary barrier of the museum."
If the database can begin to render irrelevant the walls between domains - between gallery and library and archive - it can also subvert the hierarchy of gatekeeper and supplicant. I don't think this is an either/or issue. It's not that curators, educators and others should not present their point of view. But their's is not the only point of view. It is not to be conflated with the institution, with history. Access to all the information by anyone is a critical facilitation of the database, if the museum is to prosper in an age of mass customization and interactive transactionality.
"What looms ahead or rather what has to be done is the reprise of the wonder chambers. Johann Valentin Andrea, the founder of the Rosicrucians, once advocated an archive that would include not only artworks, tools, and instruments, but also their technical drawings. Under today's high-tech conditions we have no choice but to start such an archive or endorse millions of anonymous ways of dying."
I think it is significant that Kittler identifies museum business-as-usual, essentially, as deadly for the museum itself. Certainly, to the extent that "museumification" is a kind of classification, it is no wonder that many artists are skeptical, at best, of the mausoleumizing of 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 ornithology is for birds.
Yet, in the digital age, institutions cannot afford not to try and understand, present, collect, and preserve contemporary artistic activities.
Database Culture + Datapoesis
In Interface Culture, Steven Johnson argued, in essence, that the interface is omnipresent, a defining aspect of contemporary culture. Almost unbelievably Merriam-Webster® suggests that the term database first came into use around 1962. 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 organized for rapid search and retrieval," the potential of getting-retrieving-finding what you want is omnipresent, just on the other side of the interface.
Database culture is only partly a reflection of the rise of the Internet and Microsoft sloganeering about "Where do you want to go today?™" It is mirrored more generally in what Simon Nora and Alain Minc described in a 1978 report to the French government as the "computerization of society." Even in the art world, this transformation was presciently alluded to by Leo Steinberg in his classic Other Criteria (1968, 1972).
The flatbed picture plane makes its symbolic allusion to hard surfaces such as tabletops, studio floors, charts, bulletin boards--any receptor surface on which objects are scattered, on which data is entered, on which information may be received, printed, impressed--whether coherently or in confusion. The pictures of the last fifteen to twenty years insist on a radically new orientation, in which the painted surface is no longer the analogue of a visual experience of nature but of operational processes.
Yet [the flatbed] is no more than a symptom of changes which go far beyond questions of picture planes, or of painting as such. It is part of a shakeup which contaminates all purified categories. The deepening inroads of art into non-art continue to alienate the connoisseur as art defects and departs into strange territories leaving the old stand-by criteria to rule an eroding plain.
Even as art and artists abandon a purified aesthetics and question the value of museological classification schema, within the context of the computerization of society in general, many artists are working to destabilize these activities by a methodology that might be described as "datapoesis," freeing data for a different trajectory, a different line of flight, to recall Dominguez and Delanda. Museums would do well to explore artists' process as well as their "product," fine tuning the signal-to-noise ratio - the surprise - of what we want to deliver.
In my remaining time, I am going to discuss a number of data-based artist projects as a stimulus to thinking about making databases sing; perhaps even the idea of the database as a return to the wonder chamber.
The Artist as Unreliable Archivist
The Unreliable Archivist by Janet Cohen, Keith Frank, and Jon Ippolito was commissioned by the Walker as both a parasitic archive of äda'web and a meta-commentary on the act of the Walker archiving such a remarkable and vibrant collective project.
The Unreliable Archivist, like any good archivist, creates metadata about äda'web. In this case it just happens to be a little, shall we say, idiosyncratic. . . . The value of a standard like the Categories for the Description of Works of Art is its precision - at least for experts. It allows one to make minute differentiations between objects. It allows for the discovery of specific known objects from vast databases. What it is not so good at is making connections or finding things one doesn't know about. Think of the difference between searching for a 20th-century portrait made of wood and searching for something that has ambiguous language, enigmatic images, and preposterous style.
When I first saw The Unreliable Archivist, I took it to be an homage to the wonderful, breathtaking excesses of äda'web and those who created it. I also took it to be a parody, a tongue-in-cheek commentary on the butchery that archiving - mothballing - such a dynamic institution as the Walker could entail. I still think these conclusions are true, but my concern has changed. Rather than worrying about how unreliable the archivist is, perhaps we should map the whole Walker collection according to these categories and values. What would happen?
It is possible to imagine a future in which everything is archived - from our 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 unreliable archivist? To create the preposterous, the enigmatic? No matter how intelligent archiving agents are in 2020, they will be poor substitutes if they can't represent an individual point of view.
Information is Power: Technologies to the People®
It is good for the artist to insinuate himself into the open mesh of any system--not in a provocative and visible way, but mimetically, using their same mediums.
--Maurizio Cattelan
Daniel Garcia Andujar'sVideo Collection is what I would call a typical net.art gesture. It appropriates the developing practices of the Internet - in this case database-like streaming content as well as its series of unhelpful help desk messages - and yokes them to cultural and societal desires - in this case database access to significant but not always easy-to-find cultural resources. While there is a clear element of epater le bourgeois with this work, one less predictable outcome is the economic issues that get raised. Andujar was written to by at least two artist and/or cultural institution representatives with questions that started out along the lines of "how did you do this" (technically) and ended, more or less," how dare you do this." The issue is only partly an economic one, really. By being so opaque about his project, Andujar also highlights the tension between the ideal of transparency in net culture - and in archiving - and the fact that information is knowledge - and power - whether it is about the arcana of technological capabilities such 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 enough for institutions, but one of the cornerstones of museum culture is authoritativeness and selectivity. The pioneering example of Antonio Muntadas'sFile Room, however, points to a very different model - of bi-directional information flows, multi-nodal information sources, collaborative filtering, multiple points 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 about censorship. Explicitly, it is about specific instances of censorship that have occurred anywhere in the world. Implicitly, however, it is about the fact that there has been no easily and publicly accessible source for this information; that subjects of censorship have often been beholden to traditional news sources to tell their stories, and if they are told at all, they are not always the story the subject would tell.
This kind of "filter," where the only filter is really that people have to know about the resource and be willing to take the time to upload to it, has been called a "social filter," and is present in other "open archives" such as the network group ORANG, which allows anyone who wishes to
"collaborate" to have an account to upload files or An Experience Base, A Boolean Typhoon, which also relies on the public at large to collaboratively create an SGML-based classification scheme 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 artist space, the Randolph Street Gallery in Chicago, along with technical help from the Electronic Visualization Lab at the University of Illinois at Chicago. It is now hosted by another non-profit, alternative virtual organization. What makes museums think they are necessary for the propagation of net culture? At any rate, I would submit that it is impossible to adequately represent 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 normalization of the criminal surveillance system, not to mention the rise of eugenics. In terms of the origins of the photographic archive, which gave rise, in many ways, to our present-day surveillance society, there were two important poles:
[t]he Paris police official Alphonse Bertillon invented the first effective modern system of criminal identification. His was a bipartite system, 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 several applications of composite portraiture, Galton attempted to construct a purely optical apparition of the criminal type.
And Catherine Richards at a recent ISEA Cartographies symposium spoke of surveillance as one of the three primary manifestations of what she described as the contemporary "collapse of the visual."
Of course, for those of us with popular culture tendencies, Enemy of the State confirms that the U.S. government can spy on anyone anywhere. Gene Hackman, nevertheless, provides the practical advice that if Denzel Washington doesn't look up, he will remain safe, somewhat reminiscent of the "duck and cover" teachings of an earlier era. Inevitably, one must speculate that in the near future fashionable hats on the Paris runways will be designed for the pleasurable viewing of satellite surveillance - and subsequent downloading from the Web, as a kind of tele-fashion mirror. Think about it.
In a much more rigorous way, Eugene Thacker'sftp_formless_anatomy: counter-anatomical database is precisely about how the databasing of the human body through the Visible Human project transforms it from subject to object; something entirely suitable for surveillance--not just of one dead 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 mediated through its production in imaging technologies, and, on the other, it is an assumption of the anatomical body inherited from modern anatomy as a corporeal, organized, mechanistic integral unit. The tensions of a technoculture can 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 body displayed on multiple scanning monitors are their technological correlatives.
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 imperative that artists actively participate in how data is shaped, organised and disseminated.
--Victoria Vesna
In Time Capsule, Eduardo Kac has taken Vesna's observation to a kind of logical extreme, self-implanting a bio-panoptic surveillance device - a microchip that contains a programmed identification number and that is integrated with a coil and a capacitor, all hermetically sealed in biocompatible glass. Scanning the implant generates a low energy radio signal that energizes the microchip to transmit its unique and inalterable numerical code. As part of the procedure Kac registered himself in a database set up to aid in finding lost animals, classifying himself as both animal and owner.
For Kac, the kind of literal construction of the dead, anatomical body that Thacker points to, is manifest on a daily, ongoing basis as humans adapt to become extensions of the computer--of the database/interface.
As we experience it today, the passage into a digital culture--with standard interfaces that require us to pound a keyboard and sit behind a desk staring at a screen--creates a physical trauma that amplifies the psychological shock generated by ever-faster cycles of technological invention, development, and obsolescence. In its most obvious manifestation, this physical trauma takes the shape of carpal-tunnel syndrome and backaches. In its less evident form, current interface standardization has led to an overall containment of the human body, which is then forced to conform to the boxy shape of the computer setup (monitor and CPU). It is almost as if the body has become an extension of the computer, and not the other way around. The need for alternative ways of experience in the digital culture is evident.
Datamining: C5
If the database, with its multiple fields for searching, is a direct descendent of the Bertillon cabinet, which managed to classify hundreds of thousands of subjects according to 12 measurements so that the smallest category in the system had no more than a dozen records, a descendent of Galton's composite photograph is the composite data profile.
Beginning with Lisa Jevbratt'sStillman Projects, one of which was commissioned by the Walker Art Center, and continuing with the projects 16 Sessions, 1:1, and, most recently, SoftSub, the artist group C5 has created a number of fascinating collaborative filtering projects that make manifest the vast and subterranean data mining efforts that big and small businesses alike are mounting to make a buck off your information - your body of data/databody.
The important thing about Galton's composite photograph was not whether someone did or did not look like it. No one did, by design. The intent was in the mean differentiation. Individuals that approached the composite profile to a certain degree were suspect. In a similar way, composite data profiles of likely buyers and likely offenders are being created and as your data profile approaches it, you will be acted on accordingly, whether it is with spam or a visit from a government authority.
SoftSub is an opt in program. It is a screensaver that collects information about the file structure of a user's computer. Data is collected only if a user downloads the software and only if she decides to upload her personal data. Here, an opposite approach to Andujar has a similar result. By foregrounding the practice of conscientious opt-in, the standard practice of hidden or murky data gathering procedures is highlighted. Also, it is important to point out that SoftSub is collecting essentially benign information. Even with blatant misuse, what is C5 going to do? Post on the net the 100 messiest desktops? C5's real interest is in trying to understand how to approach data sets without a particular target in mind, because as with Galton, the understanding and use of supposedly objective measurements can be grossly subverted by a particular intent.
Data Stories: DissemiNET
DissemiNET by Beth Stryker and Sawad Brooks, is a database-driven compilation of user-defined stories that is searched with a kind of fuzzy "curatorial" - as they put it - selectivity that complements a dynamic visual display to create a compelling portrait of "The Disappeared" in Guatemala.
DissemiNET also has parallels to open archives such as The File Room, as anyone can - at least during its initial installation - upload their stories related to the topic. More than being an open resource, however, it also attempts to represent and deal with notions of memory and loss and dispersion in a manner that is particularly appropriate to a computerized society.
Creating a repository for personal and social memory, DissemiNET uses web technologies to give visual form to the transactions (deposits, retrievals, and loss) through which we experience memory. The DissemiNET reelaborates terms such as "origin", "home(site)", "diaspora", and "search", in terms of and through the mechanisms of the web. Drawing parallels between diasporas and the dispersal of meaning over the web, DissemiNET in response provide spaces (lacunae) for people to recall and recollect, gathering there to re-tell stories about their own experiences with displacement and dispersal. Over time, DissemiNET will become a collection of such stories of errancy.
DissemiNET lies somewhere between the particular instance and a composite whole, but it is particularly interesting for the way, not unlike The Unreliable Archivist, the fuzzy algorithm creates relationships between stories - data - as a way to investigate semi-automated storytelling, with a bit of a point of 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 specific individual and a generalized description of a group. Neither tells the whole story. One way to get beyond just the facts, of course, is to actually tell a story. While storytelling may seem inimical to databases, the linguistic researcher Walter Ong has determined that one of the great Western storytellers, Homer, substituted a stock set of phrases according to identifiable regular occurrences. This is not exactly the same as saying that the Iliad is a database-driven hypertext, but it does hint that the storytelling and information systems are not inherently incompatible.
In a slyly funny piece, Anna Karenin Goes to Paradise, Olia Lialina tells 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 engines Magellan, 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 upwards of 90% of the links in the story now return "page not found" errors, emphasizing, perhaps, not only the ineffability of love but also the ephemerality of the Web.
Databasing Forgetting: The Impermanence Agent
Plato is said to have complained about the invention of writing and how it would compromise the art of remembering - not to mention the art of conversation. Do we need to archive everything? You do not have to be Monica Lewinsky to suspect that it is not necessarily a good thing to have a permanent record of every email dispatched into the cybervoid.
Loss is an important aspect of memory, and impermanence may be the natural state of things. Noah Waldrop-Fruin'sThe Impermanence Agent is a remarkable project that starts out as the story of the death of his grandmother. But it is designed to disappear. As the you browse the Web, the impermanence agent replaces Noah's story with snippets of text and images from your browsing, until, finally, the story is completely retold in the words of what you have been reading and looking at, with only the structure of the original story left behind.
The Artist as Reliable Archivist: Road to Victory
Museums have always told stories, but there has not always been the opportunity to counter or play with them. For his recent project for the Museum of Modern Art, Road to Victory, Fred Wilson researched the MOMA's archives for several years and then used the Web to juxtapose different stories the museum has told over the years.
In the first frame of the project, Wilson quotes A. Conger Goodyear from 1932: "The permanent collection will not be unchangeable. It will have somewhat the same permanence a river has."
For Wilson, over time, MOMA had lost a certain social agenda, which it had originally intended. He wrote about the project:
These archival photographs expose the museum's use of didactic material to persuade the public of its liberal point of view as well as its aesthetic ideas.
Interestingly, in the very same press release that quotes Wilson, the pr speak about the project demonstrates his point exactly and, presumably, unwittingly.
Fred Wilson's online project, Road to Victory (1999) - titled after the Museum's 1942 exhibition that included photographs of the United States at war - explores The Museum of Modern Art's memory of itself: namely, the institution's photographic archive. Constructing narratives through juxtapositions and connections between documentary images and text borrowed from the archive, Wilson reveals much of what, though visible, is not on display: the Museum's visitors, staff, exhibition graphics, and wall texts.
