Data Loam

PR TEXT ENGLISH The current excess of computational capacity begun to bring central questions about the nature of the humanities and natural science to light. Questions that critical artists have started to ask long before: how does science determine social structures, how does it shape our reality? What was important enough to be a subject to 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 structure to the information they contain over and above the facts themselves, since this is inherent to the ideologies used to catalogue and index them, all of which evolve over time. The novel view we will pursue, addresses objects and objectivity but, unlike traditional metrics, the materiality of the objects will be considered in an expanded sense; that is, via the multiple vectors of meaning (perception, opinion, facticity, truth, semantics) that have been attributed to them over time whilst, simultaneously addressing 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 want to introduce with 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 will provide a powerful set of metrics that can be used to enable anyone to think outside the box whilst simultaneously ushering in a replacement paradigm which encourages all of us to be the philosophers and artists of our time.

The >>Data Loam<< project started with a number of simple and yet profound questions: "What is knowledge in the 21st century?", "How is it generated an who owns, structures and governs it?", "How can we be inclusive and avoid inherent bias already on an organizational level?" By addressing these questions it first needed to comprehend and analyze the massive acceleration of information and its regimes of circulation, distribution, and preservation beyond the modern paradigm of indexicality. It took on the challenges created by the paradigm shift brought on new media, the technosphere, and profound advances in the sciences, but did so by placing art-based research and practice at the core of the study. This enabled a refocusing, away from Cold War cybernetics and binary zero-sum methods. Rather than trying to compartmentalise, frame, cut-down, or force into silos or pockets of information, >>Data Loam<< foreground this exponential explosion of Big Data. In order to do so and as one result, >>Data Loam<< had to articulate a new model capable to frame different fields of knowledge in a holistic way. In this way the theoretical concept of the "Mesh" was created - a compound of all the methodologies to generate a specific kind of knowledge as well as the topography in which it expresses its holdings. In this usage "Mesh" is not meant as a metaphor, but as kind of materiality or even corporeality. It is finite and yet open, fractal but without self-similarity. Although meshes often share similar properties and may as well overlap, some of them are closer related than others. The mesh of Medieval Scholastic for example might have little concord with Aeronautics, but still be entangled with Poetics. As part of the >>Data Loam<< project we took this approach as far as to develop an algorithm to organize a collection of data in a way that its inherent mesh structures would express themselves. This method draws together patterns in order to begin to articulate dimensionality and, therewith, matter. It points to a new paradigm, one that we are naming >>radical matter<<. The method requires the fore-fronting of experiment, making, critical reflexivity and the logics of sense. This elegantly simple and accessible move has already shown an impact at the University level, where there has been a strong and significant number of new PHDs taking up this emergent methodology regarding the radicality of matter and its coincident requirements for proliferation, multiplicity, and groundless logics of cohesion.