Oswald State Park, OR
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Soluble Fish :: digital poetics
Life Data
Back to conversing with the network. This site began as a video blog way back when and has since morphed into academic musings on digital forms with some more reflective journal entries. My main interest and art practice is still video–or “cinema” in general–but things have changed.
from Landmasses and Railways by Bertrand Fleuret
The World through My Eyes by Daido Moriyama
My iPhone and iPad, for example, have turned me on to conceptual, street and landscape photography, photo blogs and photobooks and writers who use the essay and fiction to access and harness the world database, rather than project onto it narratives from their heads. This is what the video blogging community was all about: sharing and discovering worlds captured in fragments.
Anyone who records a bit of life data, and shares that data instantly with a network – all with a few movements of the thumb and forefinger- is practicing a new form of conceptual art. The fragment – blog post, photo, tweet – does not pretend to be a whole in the way a letter, a book or a painting is a whole. A fragment of life data implies a larger context, is open for further development, conversation, remix, comments, exhibition or publication. It is part of a stream that connects to other streams.
At this point, the Conceptual artist of the 2010s should be addressing questions like, “What are the most innovative ways to continually release yourself into the field of distribution? Do you place more value on inward bound links or those that go out? How is your link strategy tied to your fictionally generated narrative mythology? What does it mean to create a value-added network and how does this relate to both your public persona/presence and your right to privacy and freedom of speech?” – Mark Amerika, aka Professor VJ
These new mobile tools make creating, consuming and remixing life data extremely easy. So what is the value added work of the artist/writer in this environment?
from "An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris" by Georges Perec
In 1974, George Perec spent three days sitting around Place Saint Sulpice in Paris watching the “tens, hundreds of simultaneous actions, micro-events” in the world around him. In his notebook he made observations of everything he saw: the make of cars, the people, what they were wearing, what the birds were doing. An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris is a work of literature that is neither narrative nor poem. It is a database–a long and incomplete list–of the “insignificant” details Perec attempted to put down on paper, including is own momentary frustrations with an impossible project. Perec’s notion of the “infraordinary” is no longer stuck in the realm of experimental literary arts. The wired among us have become similar ethnographers of the everyday, publishing streams of micro-events as they are experienced.
But what is the result of all this swirling life data? And why at this moment does there feel like a shift in attention from linear stories to databases of micro-events? Is it really all about the hive mind or is there still space for the singular visions of artists? How do we negotiate the tensions between inherited narrative models of the world and the new database models our networked technologies increasingly impose. What can be learned from the history of spatial, networked and mobile writing? How do ideas of narrative change as the author moves from inside the room to out on the street?
Anyway, these questions are the new subject of this blog.
