[-empyre-] introducing Anne Helmond and Kazys Varnelis

[Anna Munster]

Hi Greg and all,
thanks for those difficult questions!
I'll address them in 2 separate posts as I am just on the run from my computer and won't be back at it til tomorrow.

The first: in which I suggest a kind of 'resistance' to mainstream data mining activities performed by info-corporations via certain emerging 'artistic practices'. I just wanted to emphasise that the kind of 'resistance' I think might be happening on the part of artist/designer/developers who take up a critical relation to the production of 'pattern' via data mining techniques shouldn't be seen in terms of some old idea of the subversive artist.

Firstly, many of the examples I site are more software, apps and environments for producing knowledge different - for example Trackmenot (http://mrl.nyu.edu/~dhowe/trackmenot/), which is a plugin for Firefox and which prevents users' online activities being subjected to data mining searches. This isn't even art but something we might call critical social software design...another example I site is Shiftspace (http://www.shiftspace.org/), which is kind of on the border of design and social software. These kind of projects along with those of some individual artists such as Nicholas Knouf's work signal an aesthetic/design direction that tries to undermine the vector (to deploy Patrick's terminology in his chapter) of knowledge flow and transmission in  current knowledge economy/ies. They undermine not by 'overthrowing, subverting or resisting' but rather by underlining and revealing the ways in which knowledge is being regularly produced, transmitted and flows back into networked culture. Or sometimes they block and redivert those flows. They also create spaces for the production of different kinds of knowledge and knowledge environments 

I'm certainly not suggesting that these projects  are transgressive or some force that will take on the 'darkness' of data corporatisation!! But I am suggesting that there's an interesting shift in aesthetic and design practice toward the underlying conditions in which knowledge is currently and might differently be produced in networked cultures. In fact this shift can no longer rely upon the idea that 'art' is resistance because art cannot be a substantive category in that way anymore. These projects are instead about designs, architectures and contexts for producing and making different kinds of knowledge rather than being about media (new media and its utopian potential, for example) or even content (ie art with political messages).

I'll get to the world-making thing next post!
cheers
Anna


A/Prof. Anna Munster
Director of Postgraduate Research (Acting)
Deputy Director Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics
School of Art History and Art Education
College of Fine Arts
UNSW
P.O. Box 259
Paddington
NSW 2021
612 9385 0741 (tel)
612 9385 0615(fax)
a.munster at unsw.edu.au
________________________________________
From: empyre-bounces at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au [empyre-bounces at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of Gregory Ulmer [glue at ufl.edu]
Sent: Monday, 19 October 2009 1:40 PM
To: soft_skinned_space; Gregory Ulmer
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] introducing Anne Helmond and Kazys Varnelis

Anna
thanks for agreeing to moderate this discussion.  Since you are also one
of the authors of the first round of "chapters," perhaps you could
comment as well from that point of view on the issues being raised in
this conversation so far.  You offered several points of orientation
within your survey of datamining (including arts appropriations and
interventions relative to the information economy).   Two such points
are 1) data undermining:  the suggestion that an arts perspective is
subversive, offering resistance to surveillance and control; 2) cosmic
world-making (Deleuze and Guattari): a philosophical perspective on
becoming imperceptible.  Could you  elaborate on these reference points
(or others):  why you recommend them, and what they suggests as points
of entry into the complex information scene you describe?
thanks
Greg


--
*Gregory L. Ulmer*
http://www.english.ufl.edu/~glue
http://heuretics.wordpress.com
 University of Florida


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