Brett Stalbaum: Database Logic(s) and Landscape Art

I was interested to read Brett Stalbaum's piece "Database
Logic(s) and Landscape Art" in the most recent Digest.

He makes the point that database systems are independent of
interface and and remarks that "the technical organization
of data is" not "necessarily a strong predicate of user
interface", citing the "dogged reemergence of the command
line interface" in Linux and MacOSX. But Unix/IRIS operating
systems have long set sophisticated GUI's side by side with
CLI's, and what these parallel presentations of underlying
data have recognized is the fundamental fact of all binary
information–its fluidity, its inherent potential to be
poured into any appropriate mold. HTML data, for instance,
can be shaped not only to any browser/OS implementation but
to any software which can read the data, as we've seen in
various interventions created by media artists.


Of the questions Stalbaum promises to treat in a later
installment, the one which I find most intriguing is "how
the nature and conceptions of place are altered by
database". If, on the one hand, the data-stream is fluid and
open to any workable intervention or interpretation, these
very interpretations alter the way we see not just the data
but the reality from which the data has emerged and which it
represents. Think of operating systems. The metaphor of
"windows" permeates our thinking and our feeling about the
computer, suggesting that our experience is one of looking
into, through, deeper (window beyond window), working off
against the physical experience of the monitor, which is now
itself a window. In the command line interface the monitor
is instead the extension of a the typewriter's sheet of
paper, and its experience an experience of sequentiality, of
ongoing process, the mute speech of a teletype responding to
our mute inquisitions. With windows, which conceals its
complexities, we give ourselves over, like Alice, to the
phosphorescent illusion of the looking glass and its
pleasures. So different from the command line, which never
lets us forget that is serious business, this is work.


In the early days of Rhizome, I argued that media art should
get beyond the technological introversion of taking the
medium for its subject, that it should use the medium for
purposes beyond itself, as a painter uses a brush, etc.
Now, of course, there is all kinds of media art. But
I would no longer argue against the technologically
self-reflexive. It became clear that as the web developed,
a greater danger was that self-expression would be
subsumed to corporate models because the tools that we would
have at our disposal would increasingly be the tools of the
marketplace. This left a still important role for artists
whose interest was in interventions, in creating works which
stand between what is offered and what is possible, between
the interface and the data-stream.