Abstract Microecologies - Pierre Proske

A rare treat last night: some generative art in Canberra. The event was a one-night show at the Front gallery from Australian artist Pierre Proske, presenting the results of a residency at the ANU's Department of Archaeology and Natural History. Proske was embedded with the Paleoworks group, who do palaeo- and archeo-botany, mainly by way of using microscopes to look at ancient pollen.

The resulting works use micro-botanical images as poetic and aesthetic materials to reflect on the residency itself. In one series they're used to texture Superformula shapes, creating hyper-layered clouds that seem organically lumpy and mathematically crisp at the same time. In another series Proske used portraits of his Palaeoworks hosts to "seed" accumulations of tinted micro-blobs; they play on the edges of abstraction, at the same time evoking (for me at least) some big ideas about identity, multiplicity, and symbiogenesis.



Proske's blog of the residency is a wealth of detail. His previous work is worth checking out too - the Intelligent Fridge Poetry Magnets (pdf) attracted widepread attention earlier this year; and apparently they may yet appear on a home appliance near you...

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The Transcendental Data Pour - Alan Liu

Recently read this paper, by writer and online cult studs pioneer Alan Liu, which raises lots of ideas and yet more questions around data aesthetics and practices. It's a few years old, but with a few exceptions remains quite relevant. What's more it's a great read, one of the wittiest and most enjoyable things I've seen in a long while.

Approaching from writing and textuality, Liu tackles the XMLification of everything, the Taylorist dogma of the separation of content from presentation (hello, Blogger) and the subsequent waning of "cool" web design: "non-standard, proprietary, hand-coded, and other clearly infidel (or ... artisanal) practices of embodying content inextricably in presentation." Instead, Liu sees the web becoming a modular, minimalist set of containers for what he calls "data pours" that "throw transcendental information onto the page from database or XML sources reposed far in the background." Literature-wise, Liu regards these data-driven incursions as "blind spots" for both readers and writers, where authorship surrenders to parameterisation or a database query.

Liu gathers a set of artworks around the concept of the data sublime (later tackled by Manovich and Warren Sack, among others) and the question of "what can still be cool" in the post-industrial, database age. Through Kittler, he recalls the Modernist literary interest in the noise in the channel - "like tuning your radio to a Pynchonesque channel of revelation indistinguishable from utter static" -and points out that contemporary data aesthetics seem interested in the same immanent revelation, but here the sources of that data-plenitude are highly rational and structured. Data practices s/mash them up, as if in attempt to feel their inner consistency; Liu identifies this drive with the "ethos of the unknown" - a search for "an experience of the structurally unknowable."

Liu's ideas map onto current data art well enough, though rather than data pours threatening authorship, a new group of authors deploys parameterisation, mapping, munging and filtering as its main techniques. The "mother tongue" now, the source of plenitude, seems also to be increasingly social, rather than natural or linguistic (eg Linkology, The Dumpster, Listening Post). And pulling against the sublime and the ethos of the unknown is its empirical opposite, the seeking of pattern and information. The surface between these seems to be the place to be; as in the beautiful Neuromancer quote in Liu's paper, it's a liminal state where forms emerge and disintegrate. Familiar territory for the arts, as Liu points out.

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