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Hi Anna and Tim, and others on the list,<br>
<br>
Thanks for mentioning MAICgregator! And thanks again Anna for
writing about it in your recent book. Indeed, MAICgregator is no
longer actively updated, not because of some of the issues that Tim
and Anna have raised, but rather for more mundane ones, namely the
difficulties of keeping net.art active. MAICgregator functioned by
screen-scraping websites (that is, using code to "read" and collect
data from other institutions' websites), and to keep that code
current would nearly be a full-time job. I kept up with it for a
number of years, but once I finished my PhD I realized I simply did
not have time to do this anymore. There is code deep in MAICgregator
that was specific to the design and layout of tens of different
websites, and keeping track of changes in each of those websites
would itself be nearly a full-time job. There's the additional issue
that browsers themselves, such as Firefox, are developing at such a
rapid pace as to make it nearly impossible for a single developer to
keep up. Further restrictions by browser manufacturers on what
extensions (like MAICgregator) can do also makes the net.artist's
life difficult. So it has to do with obsolescence and speed rather
than the challenges of working with finance-as-topic within the art
world.<br>
<br>
But there is a separate challenge for any artist---not just a
net.artist---in working with financial data, and it is something I
touch on a bit in my recent book _How Noise Matters to Finance_.
There I write about the work of the French collective rybn and their
FLASHCRASH SONIFICATION, which is one of the few pieces that I know
of that directly addresses contemporary high-frequency trading.
Their piece sonifies the activity of a number of stock exchanges on
May 6, 2010---the date of what is now called the "flash crash"---in
order to provide an affective account of that day where the stock
exchanges had tremendous swings both down _and_ up. While the blame
for these swings cannot be placed squarely on the actions of high
frequency trading programs, these algorithms did contribute to the
volatility. Nevertheless, the piece enables one to experience the
noisy activity of the markets through sound, attuning one to the
activity of the machinic.<br>
<br>
But their piece is only made possible through the free release of a
large amount of financial data from a company called Nanex, a firm
that has been highly critical of the move towards high frequency
trading. Access to financial data is big business, and without
Nanex's release of this data rybn's project would not have been
possible. Indeed, when I was looking at working with stock market
data a number of years ago, I discovered that it would be
financially infeasible. To get access to the amount of data I would
need would cost me thousands of dollars a month in access fees,
thousands of dollars a month for computing resources, and likely
thousands of dollars a month to hire a specialized programmer.
Needless to say I did not, and do not, have those kinds of
resources. Older projects, like the famous _Black Shoals Stock
Market Planetarium_, required agreements with major stock exchanges
for access to their data feeds. It's an open question as to what
sorts of things those exchanges would allow an artist to do with
their data.<br>
<br>
I speak only for myself, but the challenges in working with
financial data as an artist are thus not concerns or fear about the
subject matter itself, but rather more mundane questions of access
and resources. And I think it's in the more mundane issues that we
find the crux of the matter, and the difficulty I personally have
with making net.art (or computational art in general) today, and
that is uninteresting complexity. Paradoxically, when we now have
access to things like arduinos or easy-to-program-in environments
like Processing, I find it more difficult to make work I find
interesting, especially if it falls outside of the confines of what
these environments provide for by default. Building a website that
wants to do something other than what WordPress or tumblr allows now
requires the use of HTML frameworks, Javascript, and a large amount
of backend code. Keeping up with all of the changes in these
libraries is itself a full-time job. (Something interesting to
consider is whether or not the proliferation of internet art on
platforms like tumblr or Instagram is due in part to the
uninteresting complexity of building websites from scratch today.)
If I step away from my iOS code for a few months I find that most of
it won't compile anymore, there are new APIs to use, and Apple has
changed the process for uploading apps to the AppStore, yet again.
While it was complex to write code a decade, two decades, three
decades ago, I feel as if surmounting that complexity through a kind
of understanding was possible. Today the parts are so integrated, so
often changing, that it takes a team of people working full-time to
understand the full stack. Perhaps that means the net.artist needs
to collaborate more, to hire people who devote their entire time to
keeping up with these changes. To me these constant changes are
uninteresting complexity. I'd rather learn and work with other
things, other complex systems, things that change at a time scale or
rhythm more suited to my body and my way of knowing and being,
instead of a temporality dictated by trends, capital, or CPUs. I'm
working out what those things and systems are, for me personally,
over the coming year.<br>
<br>
Best,<br>
<br>
Nick<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 9/14/2016 11:43 PM, Anna Munster
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote
cite="mid:47964BE6-9865-4A65-8D2F-9D4CE3B4B789@unsw.edu.au"
type="cite">
<pre wrap="">----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
Yes MAICgregator is a great example of how the question of finance totally subtends all kinds of relations across the net, especially pedagogical/knowledge ones! I also think this work was way ahead of the game in that it perhaps signalled how an activism might arise around ‘outing’ all kinds of knowledge-based institutions’ ‘investments’ in dirty monies. Recently this has upscaled to demands that universities and colleges divest from dirty financial networks.
If Nick’s around I’d love to hear from him about where he’s going with the finance-knowledge-network relationship and why he deactivated MAICgregator…is finance too touchy a subject for art?
cheers
Anna
Anna Munster
Associate Professor,
Faculty of Art and Design
UNSW
P.O Box 259
Paddington
NSW 2021
Australia
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:a.munster@unsw.edu.au">a.munster@unsw.edu.au</a>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://sensesofperception.info">http://sensesofperception.info</a>
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">On 15 Sep 2016, at 7:52 AM, Timothy Conway Murray <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:tcm1@cornell.edu"><tcm1@cornell.edu></a> wrote:
----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
Thanks so much for joining us, Anna, and for focusing our attention on net.art focusing on the finances of the web. While not directly in with Heath Bunting's piece, which I'm very pleased to see recalled, you have me thinking fondly of Nick Knouf's MAICgregator (<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://maicgregator.org">http://maicgregator.org</a>) that is a Firefox extension that aggregated information about the embeddedness of colleges and universities (I seem to recall that he focused on US institutions) in the military-academic-industrial contex. The software provided an overlay on university homepages of the data culled from government funding databases and news sources, etc., as well as information about university trustees.
I recall Nick's being aggressed quite harshly by one of my colleagues for the "terrorism" of his project (whose aim was to reveal the disguistes of terrorism of a different sort). I'm hoping that Nick will see this post and perhaps comment in more detail on this fascinating and innovative piece (which seems to be no longer active). I seem to recall that Anna might have written something about this piece in her last book as well?
Cheers,
Tim
Timothy Murray
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
Taylor Family Director, Society for the Humanities
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/">http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/</a>
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu">http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu</a>
A D White House
Cornell University,
Ithaca, New York 14853
_______________________________________________
empyre forum
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au">empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au</a>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://empyre.library.cornell.edu">http://empyre.library.cornell.edu</a>
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap="">
_______________________________________________
empyre forum
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au">empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au</a>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://empyre.library.cornell.edu">http://empyre.library.cornell.edu</a></pre>
</blockquote>
<br>
<div class="moz-signature">-- <br>
Nicholas Knouf<br>
Assistant Professor, Cinema and Media Studies Program<br>
Wellesley College, 106 Central Street, Wellesley, MA 02481<br>
Office: Clapp 306 (2016–2017 academic year) Office Phone:
781.283.2105 Fax: 781.283.3647<br>
PGP: 0xAB50A0D9<br>
<em><a
href="https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/how-noise-matters-to-finance">How
Noise Matters to Finance</a></em> available now!</div>
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