Abstract

This was a two year collaborative research project funded by the Austrian Research Science Foundation [FWF-PEEK]. Data Loam was designed as a multi-faceted arts-based approach to one of the more intractable and urgent problems facing our contemporary digital environment today: the massive proliferation of data, and with it, a particularly nuanced set of complexities confronting our national libraries, universities, research labs as well non-academic cultural institutions and industry-oriented environments. The urgency of the problem circled around three areas: archiving, accessibility and experimental. In so doing, Data Loam rejected the entrenched paradigm of indexicality as the only method capable of articulating the ‘how’, ‘what’, ‘where’ and ‘when’ of our contemporary world as the 'internet of things'. This meant rejecting also the entrenched Cold War 'binaric systematizing that tended to promote apocalyptic narratives of technology pitting ‘man’ against ‘machine’, and in so doing, taking as given the end of freedom, rule of law, governance and indeed humanity itself. Instead, Data Loam took as its starting point precisely the unruly materiality of information, with its the massive proliferation, messy logics, oddly cathected derivatives of circulation and exchange, navigational gaming, multi-dimensional visualities, crypto-economies, block-chain equivalences, and complexly sutured arenas of cultural difference. 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. It did so, first and foremost, by putting art-based research and practice at its core, emphasising the logics of sense, planes of immanence, feedback loops, multi-dimensionality, entanglement, and diffraction. Data Loam was able to reach its main goal: the articulation of how data becomes self-organised and can produce a kind of open self-governance that relies of the mass proliferation of information. On a practical level, this included developing an algorithm that could enable a new lexicographical search and tag organising system. Perhaps most significantly, »Data Loam« answered the question of ‘how’ correlations ‘matter’; that is to say, how correlations generate matter, and in so doing enable heterogeneous and local dimensionalities that ‘in-form’ aesthetic-ethical-political ecosystems. The project was linked with teaching /studio work with the MA students at the University of Applied Arts and the PHD students at the RCA. It was connected with RIAT and was rolled out in various exhibitions in Berlin, Vienna, Singapore, New Zealand and London. National libraries included: The British Library, the Austrian National Library, The German Federal Archive, the Humboldt University, and Tisch School of Arts.