Art Against Information – Reactions
My initial reaction to the reading as a whole was composed of two main points: 1) The article brings up a good point about Data vs Information 2) Are some of these projects Meaningless? It may sound rather harsh, but these were my honest reactions.
To begin with, I definitely agree that there is a distinction to be made between Data and Information, in particular how data is meaningless until someone reassesses it or makes some sense of it. Only after reorganizing it and making sense of it, does it become information. In my background of Computer Science, this is very apparent when dealing with Data Information Systems. Handling vast amounts of data using programs such as Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc, can be daunting and confusing, especially for someone jumping into a brand new database.
Typically the information is divided into tables and each table is populated with particular types of data. For example, a persons information, recipes, prices, etc. Then there is a whole language devoted to making relationships between these tables of data in order to make some sense of it all (SQL). The tables of data are extremely valuable, gathered from the right resources, say facebook to name one. But if you just have a bunch of tables, how is this valuable? Its only by drawing the relationships between the tables that you can actually get some value. This was a really nice concept brought up by this article, which I have come across before, but its nice to know several different practices can appreciate this point.
Now, as far as having some of the projects being meaningless, it is not that I am looking to be the judge as to what has meaning and what doesnt, but rather it has to do with the actual perceived value of projects. More specifically, the works of Alex Dragulescu: Abject Data. His works are definitely esthetically pleasing and impressive! I give full respect on that. Now, the ASSUMPTION that this SOMEHOW got derived from spam email is without a doubt, AMAZING. I suppose the capitalization here shows my faith in humans.
The point of it, is that Alex never mentions how the images were created or how the data was retrieved. This is simply put under the guise of letting people put their own value on the work, and their own interpretation. However, I being more pessimistic, am left asking “How do I know youre not lying to me?”. Im a little bit of a nerd, and I do see how Structure 11 with its sharp edges and symmetry can come from a data source. Data is very easy to interpret in such a way. It could be several different graphs compiled together, there are no strange sine, cosine, or complex linear equations here. It seems that it could very well be a straight interpretation of data.
However, in the untitled work of “flowers” there are conical sections displayed on the image. I know in order to graph something on a 3D plane, with any sort of symmetry and organic feel to it, there must be some pretty complex calculations being done. Now assume that all these calculations are done by computers to create this graph, great, but what was the actual data that was interpreted to give these REAL NUMBER values to plot the graph? Was it the number of times the word “enlarge” was used vs the number of times the word “Nigeria” comes up?
To me, this could all be a farce, and cold honestly be traced back to the initial point of Data vs Information. This image presented to me means nothing, it has no value, and even less so because I didnt see the work behind it. It may as well just be a picture drawn by anyone on the computer and I could care less. In contrast, the other works presented show quite a bit of symmetry and it shows information as to how many of something happened, or the frequency of an event. These are real uses of data and interpretation to show art. The flowers work, has no meaning, and seems like a student rushed to get something done and slapped on the label of “I dont need to explain how it was done, thats for you to ponder”.