The ongoing dialogue between the digital and physical worlds provides the backdrop for Data Deluge, an exhibition that presents a selection of sculpture, furniture, painting, photography, video, sound and works on paper by artists who shape Web-based and software-generated data into art. The exhibition, curated by Rachel Gugelberger and Reynard Loki, takes its name from the title of a 2010 special report published by The Economist that observed the emergence of “a new kind of professional… the data scientist, who combines the skills of software programmer, statistician and storyteller/artist to extract the nuggets of gold hidden under mountains of data.”

Data Deluge features work by Rebeca Bollinger, Jon Brunberg, Anthony Discenza, Hans Haacke, Scott Hug, Loren Madsen, Michael Najjar and Adrien Segal that communicates a wide range of concerns, from the development of the world’s stock market indices to terrorist-related deaths, from national water use statistics to male responses to photographs of women in online chat groups. Newly created commissions by Jennifer Dalton, Roberto Pugliese and Anna Von Mertens tap into the unique characteristics of Texas, and Marfa in particular, with a sensitivity to minimalist forms, local weather conditions, the tourism industry and oil.

In Choruses from ‘The Rock’, the poet T.S. Eliot asks, “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? / Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” Through various approaches and with different sensibilities, the artists in Data Deluge address this issue by presenting innovative modes of data visualization and uncovering the often unexpected beauty of information.

Data Deluge has been made possible through the support of the National Endowment for the Arts, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and the Brown Foundation, Inc., Houston, with generous contributions by Lacey Neuhaus Dorn & Tucker Dorn, Brooke and Daniel Neidich, Joseph & Esther Varet and Ballroom Marfa members.

Educational programs for Data Deluge supported by Texas Commission on the Arts, Meyer Levy Charitable Foundation, and H-E-B, San Antonio, TX.

In-kind support provided by Pud & Tigger Cusack-Schexnayder, Tobin Levy, Quality Quinn and Hotel Paisano, Marfa, TX.

Ballroom Marfa is a dynamic, contemporary cultural arts space that provides a lively intellectual environment where varied perspectives and issues are explored through visual arts, film, music, and performance. As an advocate for the freedom of artistic expression, Ballroom Marfa’s mission is to serve international, national, regional, and local arts communities and support the work of both emerging and recognized artists working in all media.

Ballroom Marfa is particularly interested in helping artists and curators achieve projects that have significant cultural impact but would be impossible to realize in a traditional gallery or museum setting.

Ballroom Marfa is a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization.

Presented in the form of a Soviet F1 Hand Grenade, the Transparency Grenade is an iconic cure for these frustrations, making the process of leaking information from closed meetings as easy as pulling a pin.

Equipped with a tiny computer, microphone and powerful wireless antenna, the Transparency Grenade captures network traffic and audio at the site and securely and anonymously streams it to a dedicated server where it is mined for information. Email fragments, HTML pages, images and voice extracted from this data are then presented on an online, public map, shown at the location of the detonation.

Whether trusted employee, civil servant or concerned citizen, greater openness was never so close at hand.

The Transparency Grenade was created in January 2012 by Julian Oliver for the Studio Weise7 exhibition at Labor 8, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, curated by Transmediale 2012 Director, Kristoffer Gansing.

The body is made of Tusk2700T, a highly resilient translucent resin, printed from a stereo-lithography model made by CAD designer Ralph Witthuhn based on a replica Soviet F1 Hand Grenade. Metal parts were hand-crafted from 925/1000 sterling silver by Susanne Stauch, complete with operational trigger mechanism, screw-on locking caps and engraving. More here.

The exhibition “Mengele’s Skull” is structured around a specially commissioned book of the same title co-authored by Thomas Keenan and Eyal Weizman. Artist and filmmaker Hito Steyerl has been commissioned to respond to the proposition laid out in this book. Next to major new works by Hito Steyerl, this exhibition presents documentary and source materials.

The publication Mengele’s Skull discusses the forensic identification of the remains of infamous Nazi-doctor Joseph Mengele after his exhumation in 1985. The forensic investigation and identification of Mengele’s remains marks a transition. From now on, the “era of the witness”, centered around human testimony and trauma, gradually gives way to an “era of forensics”, in which things — such as bones — act as the witnesses of past events. How do bones act as witnesses? What role do technologies such as 3D scans and biomedical data play in the making of forensic evidence? And what is the role and politics of images?

Hito Steyerl’s installation The Kiss is the reconstruction, using forensic 3D technology, of an event that occurred during the war in Bosnia. In 1993 twenty passengers were abducted from a train by a paramilitary unit, none of whom was ever seen again. The names of 19 of the kidnap victims are known, while the identity of the 20th — according to eyewitnesses a black man — remains obscure. Several witnesses have reported that the leader of the armed group kissed him while marching him off — nothing else is known. Rather than representing the event, The Kiss shows the absence of reliable information and data, and in the last instance, of the missing passengers themselves.

Hito Steyerl’s film Leibniz’ Skull is a two-channel work on the certainty and uncertainty of forensic identification methods. The upper gallery, conceived as a resource room, is structured around the publication Mengele’s Skull and the work of two forensic anthropologists, Richard Helmer and Clyde Snow, who played a major role in the identification of Mengele’s remains.

A film-lecture of the same name authored by Eyal Weizman and Thomas Keenan and realized by Kerstin Schroedinger describes the process of the identification of Joseph Mengele’s skull using footage of the time as well as interviews conducted with Snow and Helmer, situating the scientific process of the identification within its larger mediatized and performative context. A film co-authored by Paulo Tavares and Eyal Weizman and realized by Steffen Krämer is devoted to a contemporary political context in which forensic investigations reshape national politics. The film follows the forensic anthropologists as they recover the remains of the victims of the 1982–84 US-backed, anti-communist genocidal campaign that left over one hundred thousand Mayans dead and completely destroyed four hundred indigenous communities in the highlands of Guatemala. Also on view are what Eyal Weizman calls “documentary sculptures” — three-dimensional prints made from scans of crime scenes, used for police investigation and in courts and media.

The book published on the occasion of the exhibition is available in the Portikus bookshop and at Sternberg Press.

Thomas Keenan & Eyal Weizman
Mengele’s Skull: The Advent of a Forensic Aesthetics
February 2012, English
11.2 x 17.2 cm, 88 pages, 25 color and 24 b/w ill., softcover
ISBN 978-1-934105-91-7

Made possible by Kulturfonds Frankfurt RheinMain and ERC

Director: Nikolaus Hirsch
Curator: Anselm Franke

We used to know how to know. Get some experts, maybe a methodology, add some criteria and credentials, publish the results, and you get knowledge we can all rely on. But as knowledge is absorbed by our new digital medium, it’s becoming clear that the fundamentals of knowledge are not properties of knowledge but of its old paper medium. Skulls don’t scale. But the Net does. Now networked knowledge is taking on the properties of its new medium: never being settled, including disagreement within itself, and becoming not a set of stopping points but a web of temptations. Networked knowledge, for all its strengths, has its own set of problems. But, in knowledge’s new nature there is perhaps a hint about why the Net has such surprising transformative power.

David Weinberger — senior researcher at the Berkman Center and co-director of the Harvard Law School Library Lab — talks about some important take aways from his new book “Too Big to Know“.

Performing Data exhibition (April-June 2011) is a review of Fleischmann and Strauss´ body of work from Virtual Reality (Home of the Brain) up to Mixed Reality (Murmuring Fields or Energie-Passagen), from Fluid (Liquid Views) to Rigid (Rigid Waves) up to Floating Interface (Media Flow).

Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss from the Fraunhofer IAIS Research Institute show an intersection of the body and immaterial digital data. From Body Space (Virtual Striptease) to Knowledge Space (Semantic Map): Interactivity as an extension of touch is a central strategy of their work – interactivity with its complex relationship to reality, re-presentation and presence.

The body as interface and intersections to the disembodied digital information. Immersion in data flow causes productive moments of disturbance and suspension, and consequently – a feeling of real physical presence.

The exhibition Performing Data includes works from the early 1990s, when the artists/scientists were co-founders of the ART+COM collective in 1987 in Berlin. Since 1992 they developed their work as research artists at KHM and GMD – the German National Research Center for Information Technology, since 1997 as directors of the Media Art & Research Studies (MARS) department and since 2001 at Fraunhofer Society, in the Institute for Media Communication (IMK) and the Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems in Sankt Augustin, Germany.

The catalog with DVD and essays by Ryszard W. Kluszczyński, Derrick de Kerckhove, Luca Farulli
Released in September 2011
Editor: Krzysztof Miekus
Co-editor: Karolina Koriat
Publisher: National Centre for Culture, Warszawa 2011 in collaboration with Laznia Centre for Contemporary Art, Gdańsk, 2011
ISBN 978-83-61587-55-2
114 pages

Open Data is the idea that certain data should be freely available to everyone to use and republish as they wish, without restrictions from copyright, patents or other mechanisms of control. Open Data recently, gaining popularity with the rise of the W3C Semantic Web prospective vision.

The LinkedData network, promoted by the W3C, is the most visible part of what an open Web of data, as a complement of a Web of document could be. Vast repositories of normalized data like those from DBPedia, PubMed, GeneID, DrugBank, OECD or UNESCO are now stimulating an intensive new field of research related to the possible uses of those data in IA and knowledge management applications. Major companies involved in data exploration and information retrieval invest in this new field and study new interfaces and algorithms to bring the gap between data and users like Google and the Public Data Explorer.

Governments are increasingly recognizing the benefits of making their data open and reusable. The launch of open-data government initiatives such as Data.gov in USA or various initiatives in Europe like the Open Data Challenge, or data.gov.uk is a strong encouragement to the development of the open data movement.

The wide availability of Public Sector Information can be a key driver to develop content markets in North America, which can generate new businesses and jobs and provide more information to consumers and citizens. In Canada, the Open Data Pilot is part of the Government commitment to open government, which is being pursued along three streams: open data, open information and open dialogue, and aims to drive innovation and economic opportunities for all Canadians.

We would like to invite researchers and actors of the open data movement to present their work to the workshop. This workshop would like to bring together data providers, initiative groups, technology providers, and researchers to facilitate the dissemination of ideas, methods and promote new research perspectives related to the Open Data and the Semantic Web applications.

Topics

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Open Data sets and catalogs (including Semantic Web, LinkedData, public data sets)
• Open Data pilot initiatives (including governmental, non-profit, academic)
• Relation between Open Data and Natural Language Processing
• Architectures and systems using Open Data
• Tools and resources related to Open Data
• Open Data construction tools
• Format of Open Data (including RDF, OWL)
• Application of Open Data in maps, encyclopedic knowledge, genomics, chemical compounds, mathematical and scientific formulae, medical data and practice, bioscience and biodiversity.
• Evaluation and metrics related to Open Data sets quality, processing and software performances
• Open Data and translation
• Open Data visualization

Demos and papers related to working application or systems under development will be encouraged. We hope to cover three main perspectives: government and administrations (e.g., open data shared with citizens), industry (e.g., marketing, software applications and services), and academic (e.g., theoretical research related to Open Data production and uses).

Important Dates

• Paper submission: February 22, 2012
• Notification of acceptance: March 30, 2012
• Camera ready: April 27, 2012
• Workshop: May 27, 2012

Submissions

Two formats are proposed:

• Full paper submissions should be at most 8 pages in length, including references.
• Demo paper submissions should be at most 4 pages in length, including references.

Submission of commercial applications and research related papers are strongly encouraged when they are strictly related to real open data (e.g., innovative commercial software tool using public data-sets).

Authors are invited to submit electronically on the website of the workshop by February 22th, 2012. All papers must be written in English and formatted in PDF according to Springer LNCS style. Authors are strongly encouraged to use the LaTeX2e style available from Springer.

For submission please use our easychair site.

We have just finished two and a half glorious days at the University of Michigan. Soon we at HASTAC Central will write a formal thank you blog to all the incredible planners, organizers, and participants of our fifth HASTAC Conference, Digital Scholarly Communications, sponsored by the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, and the Kidder Residency in the Arts, and led by two of our HASTAC Steering Committee members, Danny Herwitz and Julie Thompson Klein. And many others. Incredible event.Incredible people.

Now some overview thinking, not just about the #hastac2011 but about what it all means at this point in HASTAC’s history:

In 2002, David Theo Goldberg and I left a formal meeting of humanists who were determined “to take a stand against technology” because we knew that kind of stand would be the death of humanism and the impoverishment of whatever is meant by “technology.” That luddite stance also didn’t jive with the multidisciplinary passions of the students we were seeing in our classrooms and the brilliant colleagues we knew in so many different fields who understood the revolutionary implications of new forms of interactive communication and interaction. In 2003, we gathered our first groups of scholars, at UCHRI, at NSF, and then at Stanford and Duke, and among our founding principles was the idea that we could take the practices and principles of open web developers, the collaborative methods through which the World Wide Web was created, and explore the ways that those principles and methods could transform higher education.

Some basic other parts of this include these aims: to rebalance intelligence for the interactive digital age with emphasis on collaboration, on interdisciplinary crosstalk (“collaboration by difference”); by remelding the two cultures of arts, humanities and social sciences on one side and technology and natural and computational sciences on the other; by erasing the distinction between theory and practice, thinking and making; to think about all research as public (in process as well as in final product) and shared and sharable; to use historical perspective and the archive to substitute either “techno-utopianism” or “techno-apocalypse” with “technopragmatism” and “technorealism” based on hands’ on practice not punditry (most punditry is based on what I call the “baseline of nostalgia” — an imagined past from which declension can be measured); to meld research with teaching, and teaching with perpetual learning; to re-examine pedagogy; to challenge contemporary modes of assessment; and to realize that professional seniority often does mean privilege but does not necessarily mean excellence.

That is why HASTAC is largely a network of networks, why membership simply requires signing into the website, and why we work very hard to instill the idea of productive creativity moving forward rather than critique of one another’s foibles as the best basis for the “critical thinking” that we all prize. From the beginning our three areas have been new media (building it, using it, modding it, thinking about it), critical thinking, and participatory learning. I personally do not believe you can have participator, connected interactive learning without a generous view of critical thinking, where one learns from mistakes — one does not strive to humiliate others for making them. To me, a practice based on flaming others for their failures is inherently conservative. It means that you set your own bar only at “higher than that last stupid guy’s bar” and that, to my mind, is way too low.

Here’s another part of that: calculated optimism. That is, if everything around you is a disaster, if the future only looks bleak, if there seems to be some devolution from some (mythical) past that was free of problems, easier, where everyone who went before you had a “pass,” made it in a simple way whereas you have to deal with catastrophe at every turn, then, well, why bother? The past is never as simple or easy as we think it was — either through imagination or memory. The baseline of nostalgia is more like quicksand … we get stuck there, unable to move. It is self-defeating and self-undermining. (NB: if you are a theorist and haven’t read Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism, you should!)

I am very happy to say that, in paper after paper at HASTAC2011, I saw productive, collaborative, process-oriented, creative, imaginative, interdisciplinary, engaged, and critically optimistic thinking that began with its own goals and ideals as the high bar and didn’t waste a lot of time yapping about what some other random strawperson had done badly. The critical thinking was turned towards one’s own project, how to make it better, rich, full, and, well, critical.

I was mulling these thoughts when I went to Josh Greenberg’s excellent talk “Data, Code, and Research at Scale.” I’m going to take some of the basic insights from that talk and apply them to general and personal observations from my experience at #HASTAC2011. In this endeavor I am aided by the public notetaking of HASTAC Scholar Karen Petruska, from Georgia State, whose notes for all the keynotes are on the HASTAC site and are just brilliant. I have used hers to supplement my own. You can find them here. Some HASTAC Principles Going Forward (inspired by Josh’s talk and, needless to say, my own Now You See It ideas about how we got here and where we need to be going):

(1) Learning/research as Macroscope: “Telescopes let you see far, microscopes let you see small, now we are talking about a macroscope — that let’s you see big and complex.” One of HASTAC’s founding ideas is that, if individual achievement in highly specialized research on even more specialized topics as credentialed by a hierarchy of institutions is key to the Industrial Age project of task-oriented, quantifiable, measurable productivity, then what is key to our age? Learning as Macroscope is a good metaphor for the post-1993 Internet-inspired Information Age project of collaborative, self-publishable, collectively editable thinking that aims at thinking big and complex and developing better tools for that job. Over and over at #hastac2011 I heard talks that were doing exactly that.

(2) Code is Never Finished. Josh asked, “what if scholarship worked like code?” In code, there is version control, you release an idea time stamped and you can go back and revise it later. Code is always evolving. The whole point of the HTML that Tim Berners-Lee evolved for writing the World Wide Web is that it was open and anyone could contribute, including those he had never met whose credentials were unknown or located in their skill, not in their certification or degrees or reputations. A system grants its terms of access and anyone who meets that standard can then contribute. But everything you contribute has attribution, and what you contribute becomes your reputation — and your gateway to continued participation or denial of access. Version control: that means, in part, that if an editor is doing something that impedes the improving of the code, he or she might not be invited to edit in the future. In a loose way, that is exactly how we have structured HASTAC membership. You cannot contribute to the network, to the www.hastac.org website, without signing in, but once you sign in you can contribute as you wish, as long as you realize your contribution has attribution. You are responsible to the participatory community’s flourishing by your contribution. Trust is a key component of open web development, attribution is part of that trust.

(3) Ability to tell stories with data. In every field I know right now, the ability to make narratives, to tell stories of the massive amounts of data we now have access to is absolutely key. Collaboration by difference should be sending social scientists, computational scientists, and natural scientists into massive collaboration with humanists and artists right now — and vice versa — because it is almost impossible to be brilliant at story telling and brilliant at data mining all on your own. Macroscopic research is almost always collaborative and cross disciplinary because, despite our highly successful lifelong training as academics in, for, and by Industrial Age timed, item-response testing, reaching beyond those restrictive modes is the only way to succeed in the world we live in now. The ability to tell stories with data requires understanding where, how, why, and when that data is generated, to what purpose, and by what means. Very #hastac2011.

(4) Forking. In writing code together, sometimes there are crucial and key disagreements. You come to a fork in the code and one participant wants to go one way, one another. Forking allows you to mark the place of disagreement and get past it. You agree to follow one fork. If it isn’t working, if it isn’t giving you the macroscopic view, you can then go back to the fork, and try to pursue the other path. What is great about this method in open web development, is returning to the fork, having pursued the other one, almost always means that you disagree with your original position, and now pursue the opposite form but in a way that has been transformed by having followed the other path for a time. We do not have a built-in practice — yet — of forking scholarly discourse, but, in the many papers I heard, I was seeing this open web practice incorporated as an intellectual, collaborative practice.

(5) Building Better Tools Together. As Josh said, we do not yet have forms of scholarly communication that allow us to express collaborative differences and the divergent, forked modes of working out disagreement and profiting from it. We need better modes. Having written The Future of Thinking on an open Comment Press platform and having worked to create a potential Master’s in Knowledge Network on that platform, I am all to aware of its clumsy, frustrating, difficult, and clunky affordances — yet it is also helpful because it does allow line by line annotation by others without changing the original tesk and attribution is part of contribution. But we need better tools to serve our goals.

For now, #hastac2011 was the best possible “tool” for all these goals. I leave for the airport now, returning back to Durham, energized, inspired, grateful, engaged, and, well, fired up and ready to go again. THANK YOU ALL FOR YOUR PARTICIPATION AND CONTRIBUTION.

And next time, Toronto: I can’t wait. Our first international conference. Hosted by Caitlin Fisher (York) and Maureen Engel (Alberta). It is going to be awesome. I can’t wait for our reunion, can’t wait to see you all there, and to meet others new to our HASTAC network. Sixteen months from now, in Toronto, April 25-28, 2013, HASTAC’s 10th Anniversary Celebration.

Dataviz: Visual Representation Of Complex Phenomena is an in-depth workshop on the visual representation of large datasets. Study how to capture, prepare, visualize and refine data. Gain insight in dataviz theories and start to look at data in a different way. Learn about the history of data visualization and how to create your own new and interesting designs for the future.

An all-stars workshop where you’ll have the unique chance to see top-notch dataviz and infoviz research group, DensityDesign join forces with the creators of NodeBox – the open-source, easy yet unbelievably powerful generative graphics tool, now out in version 2.0.

Better Nouveau workshops are dedicated to computational strategies applied to design. They are intensive courses in which research and education deal straight on with generative design, interaction design, digital fabrication and physical computing. A place for creative trouble/makers.

“Recently, I have begun translating weather data collected in cities into musical scores, which are then translated into sculptures as well as being a source for collaboration with musicians. These pieces are not only devices that map meteorological conditions of a specific time and place, but are also functional musical scores to be played by musicians. While musicians have freedom to interpret, they are asked not to change the essential relationship of the notes to ensure that what is still heard is indeed the meteorological relationship of weather data.” (Scroll down for the Call for Composers.)

Axis Ensemble (Philip Acimovic, Elliot Cless, Michael McLaughlin, Glenn Dickson, Jason Coleman and Sid Richardson.)

1913 Trio (Janet Schiff, Scott Johnson and Victor DeLorenzo)

Elaine Rombola, piano

Jonathan and Esthelle Rand, French Horn and electric guitar

Composers Wanted!

Dear Composer,

Weather Scores explores the intersection of meteorology with visual art and music, through a unique collaborative compositional process involving weather data, woven sculptures, graphic/indeterminate musical scores and musical performance. The core of the project is a series of musical scores entirely based on weather data, which are adapted by composers to piano performance. In conjunction, these scores are also translated into woven sculptural, data translations that also function as 3D musical scores.

I am a sculptor who focuses on the intersection of art and science and the visual articulation of scientific observations. Using the methodologies and processes of both disciplines, I translate scientific data related to ecology, climate change and meteorology into three-dimensional structures. My method of translation is principally that of weaving – in particular basket weaving – as it provides me with a simple yet highly effective grid through which to interpret data in three-dimensional space.

Three years ago, I began to integrate musical scores into the process, which led to an ongoing collaboration with Elaine Rombola. Together we’ve created a series of scores based on weather data that have been translated into musical performances and sculptures. Our work together has sparked the interest of cross-disciplinary audiences due to its curious location at the intersection of art, science and music, and we’ve had the opportunity to present the collaboration in lectures, exhibitions, and performances.

As the scores I write become more complex, we both feel the next step is to invite composers into the process. We would like to commission them to take my scores and create works based on them (less 10 minutes, for solo piano or piano with small ensemble and/or voice), with the final goal being to produce a series of concerts/sculptural exhibitions to be performed in a variety of venues across the country.

One of the first scores we are looking to collaborate on with composers is The Ghostly Crew of the Andrea Gail. In October 1991, an event meteorologists still refer to as “The Perfect Storm” entered the Gulf of Maine. The confluence of two major storm systems, a low-pressure system building over Nova Scotia called “the Halloween Storm” and a dying Hurricane Grace off Bermuda, created oceanic conditions never recorded in New England Waters. Combining weather data and fishing lore, this score follows the sinking of the Andrea Gail, a Gloucester-based fishing vessel that sank during the storm. Central to this score is the exploration of the human perspective of this tragic, yet awesome weather event.

If this sounds like a collaboration you would be interested in exploring, please contact us for more information at n_miebach [at] hotmail.com or elaine.rombola [at] gmail.com

We look forward to hearing from you,

Nathalie & Elaine