Transaction, Rematerialisation, and Visualisation in Digital Art

Singapore.
Next up here at ISEA 2008 is Daniela Alina Plewe. Her interest is in the connection of art and business - and she asks about the potential for doing art around business. Interactive media themselves are often used in an economic context, of course, where interactions are also financial transactions. There is a good potential for developing interactive/transactive media works, then; art mash-ups could resemble online businesses.

This could build on the tradition of art about business, of business around art, of art as investment. But what is important here is the dimension of interaction and transaction. In interaction, there is an exchange of meaning, in transaction, there is an exchange of value; and this may take place in the artwork itself, or around it.

Daniela refers to Duchamp as a kind of early transactionalist in this context, then - he paid his dentist in art, for example, and issued loan or bond documents in the form of artworks (the value of such bonds was in the artwork, of course, not in the bond itself). This created some trouble for Duchamp, in fact - he was accused of violating the principle of the autonomy of art in doing what he did.

In other cases, however, art is given away; in the light of an attention economy, where value is measured in eyeballs, such deals no longer are highly one-sided today. This links also to the development of creative counter-economies that are entrenched with the real world (as in Second Life, for example, but also in many other examples).

Other approaches build on the application of business practices in and to artwork - enabling artists to extract funding from audiences, for example, but also in projects like Google Will Eat Itself, which manipulates Google Adwords to make money, which is then in turn invested in buying Google shares. Buying and selling themselves can become means of artistic expression, as artists sell their own availability, private data, or other aspects of their lives. Further, the market itself can become an artform. Such transactional art operates with incentives which appeal to the value systems and rationales of participants. The success of such artworks may not depend on the value of actual transactions.

Ian Gwilt is up next. He suggests that we're rematerialising digital art as a material product, and starts with a reference to Pierre Lévy's work on collective intelligence, which revolves around an object, tool, or virtualising agent that act as catalysts to events and actions. Ron Burnett describes image ecologies, suggesting that images need to be considered in the temporal and spatial contexts in which they are viewed. Additionally, it is important to raise the lineage of digital art as coming in many cases from material art forms.

This has also been turned around - Ian shows example of reinterpretations in material form of common elements of graphical user interfaces (a filing cabinet resembling the Windows filing cabinet icon, for example). Similarly, artworks have been based on available datasets of crime statistics, mobile traffic information, etc.

Finally on to Michael Dieter now, whose research is built on the work of Bruno Latour and applies this to data visualisation. (He points to The Secret Lives of Numbers as an example of the artistic approach to this field.) The field has gradually made a transition from more conventionally spatially-based approaches to more abstract visualisation. Such visualisations are becoming increasingly crucial for the operation of network societies, and are often directed at innovation and development. This can also be read as a shift towards a control-based society - a stylisation of power -, and cognition is being amplified in the process.

In visualising data, however, the process drops away as the algorithms actually performing the visualisation are backgrounded and hidden from direct view. The paradigm of representational power can no longer be functional in understanding the operations of visualisation. What emerges here is a noopolitics, for which Web 2.0 is also a very clear example. Such noopolitics is a scaling augmentation of the biopolitics that was central to disciplinary societies; what happens now is that social aggregates are singularised as populations are fragmented into massively pluralised micro-groupings through long tail effects (this portrayal ignores the interconnection between such individual publics, however).

Visualisation, then, works to confront the long tail - it brings to light what is otherwise invisible, while introducing a (false) sense of unmediated reality. Thus, data become the issue - visualisations never simply present unmitigated data, but always already present processed data: information. How is it possible to maintain data's underdetermination, though? Even a database is already an interface turning data into information. Overall, then, this algorithmic processual dimension in visualisation needs to be confronted - it is necessary to incorporate reflexive strategies into visualisation processes. A critical practice must work to sense artefacts and acknowledge the true labour of their operations.

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