[Reader-list] Zagreb: Things With Data

NAEEM MOHAIEMEN mohaiemen at yahoo.com
Thu Nov 30 18:02:51 IST 2006 

The panel discussion is tonight, but the show will be
up until January 6th.

 - Naeem

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http://www.whw.hr/
http://www.kulturnikapital.org/OrganisationsEn/WhatHowAndForWhom

How to do things with data
a dataesthetics discussion forum


Nov 30 2006.

7 pm- 10 pm

Cinema Mosor, Zvonimirova 63, Zagreb

Participants: Léonore Bonaccini  i Xavier Fourt/
Bureau d’études, Aaron Gach/ Center for Tactical
Magic, Miran Mohar i Borut Vogelnik / IRWIN, Trevor
Paglen, Naeem Mohaiemen

##########



Dataesthetics

A group show @ Gallery Nova

Teslina 7, Zagreb, Croatia

Dec 12 2006-Jan 6 2007



Opening

Friday, 1.12.2006, 8 PM



The Atlas Group, Jean - Pierre Aubé, Martha Rosler,
Bureau d’études, Mark Lombardi, Center for Tactical
Magic, IRWIN, Trevor Paglen, Marko Peljhan/I-TASC,
Bálint Szombathy, Mladen Stilinovi, Visible Collective
(Mohaiemen, Roy, Huq, Lin, Nimoy, et al)


Curated by: Stephen Wright



########

Data has become the most pervasive – and intangibly
invasive – feature of contemporary life; of life
become data. Life systems have been the object of
sustained data gathering since the time of the
Enlightenment, and cartography, flow charts, graphs
and statistica; databases have played a preponderant
role in the shift from a society based on discipline
to contemporary regimes of biopolitical control, where
information is inseparable from the exercise of power.
Though it is still commonly held that “the map is not
the territory” – that is, that life can neither be
confused with nor certainly reduced to its
informational content – the vast expansion in data
gathering facilitated by digital nano-technologies and
integrated networks suggests that a qualitative
transformation in governance may become possible
through the sheer quantity of available data. Is the
dream of total management on the verge of becoming a
reality, whereby action on the map is at the same time
action on the territory? “You have nothing to fear if
you have nothing to hide” has become the chorus of
real-information ideologues; yet to be an individual
is to have something to hide


Artists have only comparatively recently come to take
a sustained interest in the phenomenon of information
display, classification, compiling – in short, in what
might be referred to as dataesthetics. This exhibition
brings together twelve artists and artist collectives
who use data as their artistic material. Working with
cognitive mapping, discursive form, or envisaging
knowledge production and research as a full-fledged
artistic practice (rather than a prelude to producing
artwork), these artists seek to foreground the
heuristic and socially critical potential of data use.

Plainly, such practices have precedents in the
conceptual art producers of an earlier generation,
sharing with them a broad critique of administered
lives, bureaucratised minds and instrumental
rationality. Of course, the aesthetics of data is not
merely about ordering facts and figures; it is equally
about disorganising and subverting the rational
arrangement of information and our reliance on
databases. Dataesthetics seeks to foreground some of
the most cutting-edge practices in the field of
research-based art while at the same time anchoring
them in an art-historical framework. From this
perspective, it can be argued that the data-based
practices of many contemporary artists give conceptual
art the opportunity to potentially reinvent itself,
giving it an unforeseen use value, by injecting
artistic competence into collaborative initiatives
beyond the confines of the artworld.

Dataesthetics is a three-phrase project, comprising an
exhibition, a discussion forum with the artists and
the publication of a bilingual reader, featuring
critical writings by theorists and artists working in
the field of dataesthetics.

Stephen Wright


***

30.11.2006.

19 h

cinema Mosor, Zvonimirova 63, Zagreb



How to do things with data

a dataesthetics discussion forum

participants: Léonore Bonaccini  i Xavier Fourt/
Bureau d’études, Aaron Gach/ Center for Tactical
Magic, Miran Mohar i Borut Vogelnik / IRWIN, Trevor
Paglen, Naeem Mohaiemen /Visible Collective



moderated by : Stephen Wright



Art production long sought to protect the relatively
autonomous sphere it had eked out for itself from any
incursion by the potentially deadening logic of
knowledge production and data gathering and display.
In the face of the sheer glut and facile allure of
purpose-driven information and rationality, art’s
self-assigned role was to affirm its radical
uselessness. Yet as knowledge has become inseparable
from power, many practitioners have come to see art
and art-related activity as an extradisciplinary and
even potentially subversive field of inquiry. Though
such practices are often described as content-driven,
it is perhaps more accurate to consider them in terms
of their discursive form. Critical cartography,
tactical magic and database use have become integral
components of artistic competence, which refuses to
leave social critique to the social sciences. Bringing
together Aaron Gach of the Center for Tactical Magic,
Naeem Mohaiemen of the Visible Collective, Trevor
Paglen, Léonore Bonaccini and Xavier Fourt of Bureau
d’études and Stephen Wright, the discussion forum will
focus on the performative dimension of data-based
research and its display – that is, on how to do
things, socially critical things, with dataesthetics.




discussion forum participants



Bureau d’etudes

Bureau d’études is a Paris-based media collective
founded in 1998, comprised of the artist-duo Léonore
Bonaccini and Xavier Fourt. Using complex graphic
tables conceived for the Internet, they map various
hidden global structures of finance and world
governance, formalising patterns and connections
through scientific and informational exactitude. Their
work can be viewed online at bureaudetudes.free.fr or
http://utangente.free.fr/



Aaron Gach is Visiting Faculty in the
Design+Technology department at San Francisco Art
Institute. He was inspired by studies with a private
investigator, a magician, and a ninja to form the
Center for Tactical Magic—an organization dedicated to
the amalgamation of art, technology, magic, and
activism. Working across disciplines—art, design,
architecture, and community service—Gach’s
collaborations have involved members of the Black
Panthers, Earth First!, and the American Red Cross to
name a few.

www.tacticalmagic.org



IRWIN

IRWIN was founded in 1983 as the visual-arts component
of the Slovenian art collective NSK, based in
Ljubljana. Together with many collaborators they
started a project East Art Map intended to serve as an
orientation tool in the still-undefined field of the
art of the East. The aim of the East Art Map is to
show the art of the entire space of Eastern Europe, to
take artists out of their national frameworks and
present them in a unified scheme.

www.eastartmap.org



Naeem Mohaiemen is a filmmaker and media artist
working in New York and Dhaka. His projects include
Visible Collective (disappearedinamerica.org), "The
Young Man Was No Longer A Terrorist" (Dictionary of
War, Mufathalle), and "Muslims or Heretics: My Camera
Can Lie?" (UK House of Lords). Essays include "Islamic
Roots of Hip-Hop" (Sound Unbound, MIT Press, DJ Spooky
ed.), "Terrorists or Guerillas in the Mist" (Sarai 06,
part of Documenta 12 journal project) and "Why Mahmud
Can't Be a Pilot") (Nobody Passes, Matt Bernstein
ed.).

disappearedinamerica.org



Trevor Paglen is an artist, writer, and experimental
geographer working out of the Department of Geography
at the University of California, Berkeley. His work
involves deliberately blurring the lines between
social science, contemporary art, and a host of even
more obscure disciplines in order to construct
unfamiliar, yet meticulously researched ways to
interpret the world around us. His most recent
projects take up secret military bases, the California
prison system, and the CIA’s practice of
“extraordinary rendition.”

www.paglen.com



curator and moderator

Stephen Wright is an art writer and programme director
at the Collège international de philosophie (Paris).
"Dataesthetics" follows “Rumour as Media” (Aksanat,
Istanbul), following “In Absentia” (Passerelle, Brest)
and “The Future of the Reciprocal Readymade” (Apexart,
NYC), as part of a series of exhibitions examining art
practices with low coefficients of artistic
visibility, which raise the prospect of art without
artworks, authorship or spectatorship.


Dataesthetics is part of the project Zagreb – Cultural
Kapital of Europe 3000

http://www.kulturnikapital.org



 
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