data diaries (critique) - LONG

[Kim Cascone <kim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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Subject: Data Diaries Thread

[editor's note: Discussion about Cory Arcangel's new artwork, Data Diaries,
dominated Rhizome Raw this week. These excerpts are meant to approximate
some salient discursive themes, but interested parties are encouraged to
check out the Rhizome web site for full coverage.]

On 2.17, Jo-Anne Green announced:

For Immediate Release February 17, 2003 New Commissioned Work on
Turbulence: DATA DIARIES by Cory Arcangel
http://turbulence.org/Works/arcangel/index.html

With an introduction by Alex Galloway
http://turbulence.org/Works/arcangel/alex.php

DATA DIARIES is 11 hours of video footage which was generated by
tricking Quicktime into thinking the RAM of a home computer is video.
This was done once for each day in January 2003. Watch as Cory's emails,
letters, webpages, DSL data, songs, and anything else he worked on that
day float by as a totally-psyched attention deficit disorder 15 frames
per second video experience.

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Michael Szpakowski replied:

....but of course that's not what we see at all. There's no way the viewer
can know that what is on the screen has some connection to Cory's this
and that except by way of the artist statement. Take the 'concept' away
and the poverty of the thing immediately becomes apparent - if the
artist simply constructed the images we see we might say, OK that's
vaguely interesting and attractive in a kind of wallpaper way for about
2 seconds but 11 hours ...please! By far the most interesting thing
about the piece is the neat lo fi handwritten bubbles and the general
presentation of the piece, but then maybe that took a little bit of
craft. michael (szpako@xxxxxxxxx)

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"t.whid" responded:

first that argument never wins. there's nothing wrong with having to
know a few things to appreciate an artwork. you've been trained from
birth to look at media in different ways and there is no reason why you
shouldn't learn something that takes 15 seconds to read to appreciate
another level of this work.

the work itself is very interesting to look at without knowing anything
about it. what's interesting is it's organic yet machine-like animation.
it's full of surprises if you watch it for a little while.

t.whid www.mteww.com

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Marisa S. Olson added:

"data diaries" is one of the most beautiful things i've see on the net
in quite some time and, in all honesty, it's restored some of my
recently lost faith/enchantment with net art.

{of course, one may argue that it is not "net art" because arcangel is
not a "net artist," per se, but it's rendered in a way that bears
site-specificity/-reflexivity, given that it's encoded for a primarily
internet-based video medium/channel and is, afterall, presented on the
internet...}

"poverty"? arte poverte this is not, if only because it clearly has a
very specific content (to bracket medium-specific issues). if "poverty"
refers to a certain aesthetic void, i would strongly disagree. the work
is far from static and is visually stunning=97yes, i said stunning...
nonetheless, some of history's greatest painters gave us work that might
also be called "wallpaper" but their blue boxes, white on white, image
loops, pinstripes, and swaths of camouflage remain rich in both content
and poetics.

to me, this trumps the work currently being called "net art" simplybecause
it exists on the net, without awareness of network conditions or
which simply caters to a darwinian-"evolutionary" lust for higher
technologies, resulting in self-congratulatory didactics.. two main
pitfalls in much contemporary "net art," as i see it. this is another
reason that arcangel's interest in "defunct' media and dirt-style design
are refreshing, if not downright nostalgia-inducing.

marisa (marisa@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx)

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i've gotta agree with t on this one, michael... the thing about works as
conceptual as this is that there's all too often a poverty of sensory
material...which is the point behind conceptual work...to avoid there
being any sort of art object at all... this of course is a hybrid, and i
find this fascinating...i would first of all like to know how cory
tricked quick time into thinking his RAM was video....and it's a small
feat of hacking skill/programming that he managed this... drop an image
file onto notepad, and you get the code behind the image...is that
codepoetry? i dunno...but in some ways this piece strikes me as just
that: the innerworkings of something we're not meant to see... in that,
it's quite artful Lewis LaCook (llacook@xxxxxxxxx)

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Alexander Galloway's Intro text for 'Data Diaries'

Intro text for Cory Arcangel's "Data Diaries"
http://turbulence.org/Works/arcangel/

Every so often an artist makes a work of art by doing almost nothing. No
hours of torturous labor, no deep emotional expression, just a simple
discovery and out it pops. What did Cory Arcangel do in this piece? Next
to nothing. The computer did the work, and he just gave it a form. His
discovery was this: take a huge data file--in this case his computer's
memory file--and fool Quicktime into thinking it's a video file. Then
press play. Your computer's memory is now video art. Quicktime plays
right through, not knowing that the squiggles and shards on the screen
are actually the bits and bytes of the computer's own brain. The data
was always right in front of your nose. Now you can watch it.

In college Cory used to slip into the public computer clusters, saddle
up to a machine and pull what's called a "core dump." In every
computer's memory there are countless pieces of left-over information
just sitting there waiting for their turn to vanish as new memory is
allocated. The email you just wrote is there, so is that Word file that
was on your screen an hour ago. The binary data from Photoshop that you
left running in the background is there too. A core dump simply writes
all that data into a file and saves it on the hard drive. A born hacker,
Cory would sift through this tangle of undifferentiated code, line by
line, looking for interesting morsels. Maybe he would find a forgotten
love letter here and there, maybe someone's term paper, or maybe just
nothing. But it was always a rewarding hunt. For this piece, Cory has
simply taken his hacker mentality one step further and converted the
hidden world of computer memory into the time-based medium of video.

Data conversions are part of computer art. This is the crux (and also
the crutch) of RSG's "Carnivore" project. Dictionary words are converted
into three dimensional spaces in Marek Walczak and Martin Wattenberg's
"The Apartment." Mark Napier did pure data conversion with "Feed." What
sets Cory's RAM videos apart is that they don't pretend to hinge on the
craftiness of the conversion. Conversion is not what they are about. The
conversions here are incidental, a trivial detail coming ages before the
real fun takes place. And because of this, he eschews the A-to-B
instrumentalism of these other conversion-based works.

Lots of artists talk about memory. But for artists working with
computers, memory has a very specific technical definition. If ever
computers had a subconscious, this is it. Cory describes it as "watching
your computer suffocate and yell at the same time." They look like
digital dreams--the pure shapes and tones of real computer memory. Each
video documents a new day, and each day the computer offers us a new set
of memories.

But the greatest thing about Cory's net art is that he's not a net
artist. He never was and never will be. If net art was cinema, then Jodi
would be Godard--fresh, formalist and punk-rock to the core.
Entropy8zuper! would be Tarkovsky--lush, magical and complex. Etoy would
be Verhoeven--hyper modern, sexy and a tad fascistic.  And this leaves
Cory, playing in the rec room with his Pixelvision camcorder--all
dirt-style, geekcore, and what we like.

--Galloway/RSG

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debordguy (debordguy@xxxxxxxxxx) wrote:

ja.

there's also an (obvious) formal/visual relation to structuralist
filmakers like paul sharits / michael snow and a bit of ken jacobs
thrown in as well (in the form of _proto_cinehacker).

(so clearly, better to be filed under cinema than net.art)

what i like about how the data dairies render now (through quicktime) -
is this quality of a non-sensical *expos=E9* of cory's dirty laundry
dressed up as a (retro) structuralist film. naked data in a naked city.

and i certainly don't mind reading a little bit to laugh like that.

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jim andrews added:

[...]

i recall a post from a while ago by curt cloninger in which he pointed
out that early computer art was more or less necessarily almost solely
conceptual, given the technological constraints upon it in terms of
visuals, sound, and bandwidth. and he posed the question as to whether
this needed to continue as the predominant modus of net.art, given that
though there are still constraints on tech and bandwidth, both have
advanced to a state where such an aesthetic is not necessarily required.

also, i would point out that the rectilinear, often purposefully
'pixelated' style we associate with the arcangel piece is very new york
- eastern european early net.artish in its associations. to me, it's
less interesting as something to look as contemplate as a reiteration of
the style of early net.art. to me, the discussion about it and the
galloway essay read like ads for 'classic' net.art. want a piece to be
championed by the early net.artists? do it in their style. pay tribute.
meet good guys.

the 'paris connection' project at http://turbulence.org/curators/Paris
is an attempt to discuss work that does not reiterate this style but,
instead, has proceeded into a shift in net art that i find appealing and
relates to yours and curt's observations. it is not new york. it is
paris. the work is often wonderfully conceptual and philosophical, even
minimal, as in the work of Antoine Schmitt and servovalve, but it is
also capable of what is to me a more fecund exploration of video--in the
work of clauss and birg=E9, for instance--than the arcangel work. and the
explorations of audio, for instance, in the work of servovalve,
lamarque, and birg=E9 combine tech with the sensual and experiential.

something beautiful is unfolding in paris. though there are, among the
six parisians, some top art-programmers, birg=E9, for instance, is not a
programmer but is known for his work in multimedia audio in france, is
the king of multimedia audio there, and is a full collaborator with the
others. we see in this loosely-knit group a strong modus of
collaboration between programmers, audio guys, people involved in
dance--and a range of other media and arts. we see a tremendous
synthesis of arts, media, and programming in their collaborative work
together. toward an art for the net that is as good as any art on the
planet. and an art in which there is no axe through the middle of the
brain between experience and concept. it is rich in both.

paris connection is an attempt in english, french, spanish, and
portuguese to tell the world about their work, related work, and these
larger contexts in which net.art is proceeding beyond the solely
conceptual cerebrations of early net.art. there is a strong tradition in
french culture toward synthesis of arts and media. here is a quote from
guillaume apollinaire from 1917:

"These artifices can still go much further and achieve the synthesis of
the arts, of music, painting, and literature ... One should not be
astonished if, with only the means they have now at their disposal, they
set themselves to preparing this new art (vaster than the plain art of
words) in which, like conductors of an orchestra of unbelievable scope
they will have at their disposal the entire world, its noises and its
appearances, the thought and language of man, song, dance, all the arts
and all the artifices, still more mirages than Morgane could summon up
on the hill of Gibel, with which to compose the visible and unfolded
book of the future.... " "L'Esprit Nouveau et les Poet=E8s" Apollinaire,
1917

interesting and encouraging that both the arcangel and paris connection
are published on turbulence. turbulence at turb. that's what we like to
see. turbulence and synthesis. many thanks to helen thorington and jo
for publishing and encouraging both.

ja

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marc added:

Perhaps it is wrong for me to use Cory as a virtual hammer to pick holes
in the obvious failings of contemporary net/web art, and isolationist
snobbism. But, there are many questions still not answered, that have to
be challenged and reevaluated genuinely and not by protocol. Cory's art
is not 'Punk', it advocates the style of it, but it certainly does not
fill the void that punk fills for me. if you have to pin an art
reference to justify its being, it certainly ain't Punk.

+ + + +

Curt responded:

I've added cory's piece to this exhibit:
http://www.deepyoung.org/current/hardwired/  (scroll down some), Deep
linking it past the artist statement, and [re/de]-contexualizing it
according to the Young method.

had you first come upon it this way, would it qualify as punk?
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