08_Data Loam

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The current excess of computational
capacity has begun to bring central
questions about the nature of the
humanities and natural sciences to
light. Questions that critical artists
have long since been asking: How
does science determine social structures?
How does it shape our reality?
What was important enough to
be a subject of further examination?
What has been overlooked or deliberately
suppressed?
We want to go one step further
and use novel computer-assisted
research as well as software-based
visualisation methods to understand
how knowledge is organized in world
information systems like the Library
of Congress or Wikipedia. We want
to develop an interface to this “topography
of knowledge” in order to see
how these powerful systems express
a metastructure of the information
they contain, over and above the
facts themselves. This metastructure
is an inherent artefact of the
ideologies used to catalogue and
index information, which evolve
over time.
The novel perspective we take still
addresses objects and objectivity.
Unlike traditional metrics, however,
it considers the materiality of the
objects in an expanded sense; that
is, via multiple vectors of meaning
(perception, opinion, facticity, truth,
semantics) that have been attributed
to them over time. Simultaneously,
it addresses the “radical matter” of
the algorithms as constituted by the
flow of zeroes and ones. This “topography
of knowledge” will enable
a stronger relation to Big Data (or
Metadata) as something quite different
and far removed from surveillance
or invasion of privacy. It will, at
least in part, work toward the ability
to establish a stronger, profoundly
pluralistic democracy of objects and
to understand human prejudice as
a historical factor that can be calculated
and traced.
We want to investigate and explore
the possibilities of artistic interaction
with these big “bodies” of data and
are proposing to transform data
into some kind of “matter” that
allows us to touch, restructure and
re-organize it.

DATA LOAM — the new material we
endeavour to introduce in this project
— is based on the substance that
is already used (and often abused)
by institutions, governmental agencies and industries. We want nothing
less than to enable everyone to
create and shape a true / fictional /
absurd variant of the world as we
know it: a laboratory of possible realities.
DATA LOAM provides a powerful
set of metrics that can be used
to enable anyone to “think outside
the box” whilst simultaneously ushering
in an alternate paradigm that
encourages all of us to be the philosophers
and artists of our time.

TEAM
Marc Orou
Martin Reinhart
Matthias Strohmaier
Virgil Widrich (PL)

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