Going to Patrick's question "are we going to be Smithsons or Bierstadts
(shaping the terrain, or masterfully representing it)?", I think that
the answer is neither. C5 has been trying to look at the state of
information technologies today (and how they penetrate and impinge upon
the actual), in order to speculate (theoretically and in new work), what
the contemporary alternatives might be. As brief as I can afford at this
time, the general problem seems to one of producing experience and
exploration in (and of) the landscape utilizing and exploring the
intersection of the land and its data other(s). In order to do this, we
have pursued an agenda of theoretically characterizing the ontology of
data, explored projects that include data about the landscape as
catalyzing or even dominantly influencing factors on the performative or
aesthetic outcome, and are codifying our experience with the kinds of
computational needs we experience (in rolling our various experiments)
in software libraries that we hope will be helpful to others. We are not
shaping the terrain, but shaped by it, and are not representing it, but
recognizing that representations of the landscape today (data models,
GIS, etc), play an active role in the actualization of place. Most of
our papers and our present projects (in progress) can be seen at
www.c5corp.com.

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Date: Mon, 6 Sep 2004 10:37:45 -0400
From: patrick lichty <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: power/control

This conversation is getting really meaty.

Let's consider one thing.
Sooner or later, _someone_ is going to create a classification that will
stick in the history books, regardless of how distasteful that might
sound. It might take 5 years, 20, or 100, but it will happen, and
eventually we will all be quite dead, and unable to object.

Power and control - I have no answer to this, but will we as
technological artists (note I'm not using NM, as I'm talking more
broadly), come to some social contract regarding our own
taxonomies/classifications, or Powers forbid, announce a 'Movement'? In
this project, there will have to be a lot of negotiation and compromise
if we are to define ourselves (hopefully quite broadly). If not, the
'we' who are historians and curators will classify the technological
genres in the artists' stead.

I know several historians who are in the gates getting ready to do just
this. And when they publish, that's that, or at least as more of them
publish, it will become more of a fait accompli. The pin will be
through the thorax of the butterfly.

Some of you may object to this, and to an extent, so do I. However,
this is historiography, and are we going to be Smithsons or Bierstadts
(shaping the terrain, or masterfully representing it)?


Patrick Lichty
Editor-In-Chief
Intelligent Agent Magazine
http://www.intelligentagent.com
1556 Clough Street, #28
Bowling Green, OH 43402
225 288 5813
[log in to unmask]

--
Brett Stalbaum
Lecturer, psoe
Coordinator, ICAM
Department of Visual Arts, mail code 0084
University of California, San Diego
9500 Gillman
La Jolla CA 92093