Pwilson2461's Blog

It is strange to think that the technology that is utilized – to locate threats in our world, to locate an exact location to develop directions by, to immediately be able to trace the signal of a household if a person is in distress, and to find out information of our geographical world – is now being utilized in collaboration with each other to present an art form. Though, throughout our history technology has always been apart of art. Each decade, a more tangible creation becomes available. This is just the new evolution of an art form. From photography to sound to moving picture to the Internet to the digital world to interactivity and now to, proprietary geospatial technology.

In Ryan Griffis – “For an art against the cartography of everyday life”, he discusses the form of the technology in relation to our privacy, to the definition of its art form, comparing it to what is used today i.e. GoogleEarth, Housing Maps, and Chicago Crime. He continues to provide further examples and mentions the critique of location-based media art. I especially enjoyed the last part of his essay. Griffis states, “The melding of knowledge and space requires the simultaneous fusing of that knowledge with privileges of mobility and technological access.” I am not quite sure what he means by this but I like it – in order to attain a knowledge of our land, our sky, our water, and our planet, we must acquire the access in order to analyze this new technology. Therefore, freedoms may become controversial and lines may be crossed in that, “Many have attacked this complicity and the historical connections between contemporary technologies of geographic visualization and the US military” (Griffis). To know that this technology stems from the military invention may skew away our aspiration of this tool. Interesting so, if our military was exceptional and gave us joyful results, so many technologies and theories would be skewed to the other end of the spectrum. There is a link/source from Griffis’s article to a type of educational blog. A blogger named Brian says this: “The fact that the difference between such efforts and the current military maps used by the Pentagon does not appear clearly on American TV is hardly something you can blame the artists for! There is a difference between general culture critique and constructive critique directed toward people carrying out specific projects.” This linkage – now that artists are utilizing this tool, they can now get blamed for geocaching problems.

“Acknowledging the shifting boundaries between the space we consider inhabitable and these computerized spaces, the notion that we are moving through the space created by satellites and control centers, miles away from our perceived location, becomes thinkable. And if we can move through these spaces, our movements can likewise be regulated by them” (Griffis). This is the ultimate downside of this technology nicely stated. In order for us to indulge into this fantastic technology, our privacy becomes less and less. He later states, “Media theorist Drew Hemment has suggested that locative media might be better termed “embedded media” in recognition of its “inherent complicity in the operation of power,” referring, of course, to the recent practice of journalists being “embedded” with the US military” (Griffis). The upside as seen in the past decade through the news – our ability to record any situation at any occurrence, is quite astounding. From a bank robbery, to an oil spill, to a hurricane, we get the results all around the world in just a moment. Therefore to cut at our privacy will in turn boost our safety. This is the upside and I believe it. Or at least, we can understand more aspects of our ruling government – less secrets allowed. I say the more creations artists make with this technology, the better. ‘Pandora’s Box’ has already been opened, so we cannot go back, therefore let us expand it and depict it’s sight, then become entertained from what we get.

http://www.re-public.gr/en/?p=176 – Ryan Griffis, “For an art against the cartography of everyday life”
http://www.turbulence.org/blog/archives/000493.html – Brian Holmes

It seems today that the majority of artists build pieces in order to earn a buck. This reasoning, according to Gregory Sholette, seems to be a much more popular logic than the logic of creating something for the absolute artistic value. The artists in our world are becoming more focused on the economy of their artwork than what they believe as the most interesting idea. This combined with the idea that many people today – considered artists – do not even have a Bachelors of fine art, and are creating best selling stuff. Does that make their art not sophisticated art? If it produces a lot of money, does that make it good art? Sholette speaks on this matter stating different genres of the artworld, different scholars and artists giving their own critique, and demonstrating his own principle titled, the “Dark Matter” of the art world.

In astronomy and cosmology, dark matter is theoretical matter that exists based on gravitation and radiation. “Cosmologists describe dark matter, and more recently dark energy, as large, invisible entities predicted by the Big Bang theory.”ª On a larger scale, individual galaxies are concentrated into groups, or what astronomers call clusters of galaxies. The space between galaxies in clusters is filled with hot gas. By studying the distribution and temperature of the hot gas we can measure how much it is being squeezed by the force of gravity from all the material in the cluster. This allows scientists to determine how much total material or matter there is in that part of space. Most of the stuff in clusters of galaxies is invisible and, since these are the largest structures in the Universe held together by gravity, scientists then conclude that most of the matter in the entire Universe is invisible. This invisible stuff is called ‘dark matter’, a term first used by Fritz Zwicky who discovered missing mass in galaxies during the 1930s. Though there is ongoing research, there is no evidence on what it is exactly and how much effect it does or will have in our Universe.º

I found the background and definition of ‘dark matter’ to be interesting – not quite understanding Sholette’s use of it as his primary metaphor in his essay. He relates this cosmological theory to making up the “bulk of the artistic activity produced in our post-industrial society”ª – the ‘missing mass problem’. Sholette states that most professionally trained artists exist within this “darkness”. These artists are everywhere. According to the scientific metaphor, 90% of our planet…emphasized to make his point of course, are these well trained artists. They exist within the background because they do not seek greed and keep producing things to hopefully reach a point where their idea becomes tangible. Very few gain such “visibility with the formalized institutions of the art world”ª. The ones who do, so says the author of the essay, are the “informal” ones who create work in order to “infiltrate high schools, flea markets, public squares”, etc… and “do not set out to recover a specific meaning or use-value for art world discourse”.ª Why? Because people seek entertainment. They desire this before meaning or more so, rather this. This mixed with anything that may be considered cheaper, more joyful generating, or higher reputation value, gives people a reason to participate.
“What can be said of dark matter in general is that either by choice or circumstance it displays a degree of autonomy from the critical and economic structures of the art world and moves instead within, or in-between, the meshes of the consciousness industry.”º

It is a choice any person makes in their field – to search for the more commercial aspect (safe, affordable, mainstream) or pursue a self-desire/individual type field (risky financially, outcast possibility, and your own). The value on how much ‘education’ you contain, does not matter to me. Karma: ‘what goes around comes around’ or “good actions produce good fruit and bad actions produce bad fruit”. There is a Buddhist and Hindu linked theory called Karma Yoga – to do the fruit of the action without the thought i.e. no action, no intention, just reaction – only result. Therefore, the idea of doing good, or the process in doing the good deed, has no importance. Only the end result, the final action is what matters. It is an interesting Eastern theory that I believe should be the primary judgment to a successful piece.

ªNeMe: DARK MATTER – Activist Art and the Counter-Public Sphere by Gregory Sholette. February 2005: http://www.neme.org/main/330/dark-matter#fn13
ºChandra – X-Ray Observatory. Cambridge September 2010. “Dark Matter”: http://xrtpub.harvard.edu/xray_astro/dark_matter/index.html