[-empyre-] Excerpt from Database Logic(s) and Landscape Art

[Brett Stalbaum <beestal@cadre.sjsu.edu>]

[T]he landscape prehends to some degree its own modification by humanity.
This concept seems counter-intuitive, but an example makes it
straightforward. Dams, for example will be constructed in topographies and
geologies that allow them to function as dams. [10] Data models lie in
some position between a two way conversation between the cultural and the
topographical that lead to actual modifications of the landscape. In
autopoietic terms, the exploration of relations between topography and
culture through informational interchange is beginning to reveal examples
of structural coupling [11] - like behavior between them. To grasp this,
it is important to understand that data has simultaneously become a
catalyzing factor in the conversation, not merely an analytical tool for
exploitation. This feedback loop alters the character of the human
relationship to landscape from that of relatively unplanned domination to
a somewhat more sensitive symbiosis. [12] Data and control systems provide
a channel through which eco-systems are able to express an influence in
favor of their own protection [13]. In addition, the landscape
occasionally demands (or acquiesces to) a new bridge, water diversion,
nuclear waste site or freeway interchange. Thus one of the problems that
artists (and possibly scientists) working with landscape as data must deal
with is the embeddedness of the precession of models in-between the
political and the immanence of data as it is processed into information.
This political dimension to the inquiry deals with mapping as a cultural
production embedded within a set of scientific descriptors which drive our
cultural relationship with the land. How can we begin to describe the
complexities that emerge from this relationship?

...

Data is ... not unreal; it is a virtual reality that participates in
instantiation. The mechanisms of data that participate in actualization
can be discovered through modes of experimental exploration in virtual
space. We might be tempted to infer that it is the information, knowledge,
(and related opportunity) that can be mined from modeled data (in relation
to the virtual), which play the catalytic role in the generation of the
real landscape where humanity is involved, and to a large degree, this has
been the case historically. In this view, the techniques of virtual
science allow us to search for predictive scientific truths that can be
rationally manipulated. But of course, there are perspectives that
potentially make this inference problematic. We could, for example, pose a
Marxist-semiotic analysis; positing that there exists parasitic cultural
assumptions that cleave to (or are expressed in) data models (and thus the
data collected), which are otherwise sincerely generated for scientific
purposes. In other words, do notions of progress, development, land use,
extraction of natural resources and other cultural or economic desires
dictate the manifold, perhaps through omission of descriptors, based on
the 'purpose' that the data is intentionally collected for? This could
explain the subtle and perhaps even unintentional manipulation of science
to either deny or confirm humanity's influence on global warming, to site
just one well known example.

Alternatively, data's role in the instantiation of the actual may be a
matter of virtual informatic interrelations (or external relations between
data sets), forming their own consensual domains [16] that heretofore have
not yet been observed as such, but which potentially inflect the operation
of actual systems via informational transfer between neighboring systems
of interrelations. In other words, data interrelations may themselves be
vectors that influence the trajectory of actual systems. This theory
depends on the idea that data is not only real, but actual, and capable of
actualization. Although it is likely that all of these issues are all
interoperable to some degree, Joel Slayton hints at C5's orientation by
posing the following: "These are factors of economic and political
assessment which infer that database logic necessarily has to surpass
intentionalities. Are artists just going to do economic, rainfall and
surveillance models, or does the question shift to other subject-less
concerns of mere informatic relations? If so, what is the semiotic
context?" [17] Subject-less (or non-semantic) informatic relations must
express some form of semiotic-like behavior if actual (because actual
systems can ultimately be signified, such as imaginary numbers), but would
be difficult to penetrate from either the examination of their semiosis,
(how do we observe a system when we don't know what questions to ask), and
from the perspective of a language to express that which is after all
non-semantic. "Clarity endlessly plunges into obscurity" [18] under such
analytical circumstances. This is obviously a highly speculative
territory, but if tactics to reveal such relations of data can be
developed, and if they can be generalized, then we have a new
understanding of database [19] that may account for the two way
conversation between the cultural and the topographical, (or the genetic,
the chemical, the quantum, etc.) C5 enters this terrain in explorative
fashion though the semiotic context of our discipline (as artists), with
landscape and its data as the object of study.

http://www.noemalab.com/sections/ideas/ideas_articles/stalbaum_landscape_art.html