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December 15, 2008 at 9:10 pm - by Anna Munster, Dynamic Media

Please find my submission for the Networked_art/Networked_writing project.
This includes author details and CV; followed by 3 samples of networked writing with details about these; and my proposal for a networked writing chapter.

Anna Munster
School of Art History and Art EducationCollege of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales
P.O Box 259Paddington
NSW 2026
Austraiia
A.Munster@unsw.edu.au
www.dynamicmedianetwork.org
+61293850741

Selected Publications, 2000-8

Books
Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics, 2006 Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England
Book Chapters
‘Welcome to Google Earth’ forthcoming 2008, Critical Digital Studies Reader A and M Kroker eds, University of Toronto Press: Toronto,
‘Outage, Seepage, Blockage: art and cultural praxis in the network’ forthcoming 2008, Place: Local Knowledge and New Media Practice, D. Butt, J. Bywater and N. Paul eds, Cambridge Scholars Press, Cambridge, UK, 78–92
‘Bioaesthetics as Bioethics’ 2008, Art of the Biotech Age, M. Pandolowski ed, Experimental Art Foundation/IMA Books, Adelaide and Brisbane, Australia,14–21.
‘Media Art Zones – But Where’s the Media?’ 2006, Zones of Contact: A Critical Reader, N. Bullock and R. Keehan eds, Sydney: Artspace Visual Arts Centre 55–60
‘Digitality – approximate aesthetics’, 2004, Life in the Wires: The CTheory Reader, A. and M.L Kroker eds, Victoria Canada: New World Perspectives/CTheory Books, (15pp) 415–29
‘Returns of the Diminishing Body’, Future Bodies. Visualisierung von Körper in Science und Fiction, 2002, ML. Angerer, K. Peters and Z. Sofoulis eds, Vienna: Springer Verlag, (21pp) 143–60
‘Net Affects: responding to Shock on Internet Time’, 2001, Fibreculture: Politics of a Digital Present: An Inventory of Australian Net Culture, Criticism and Theory, H. Brown and G. Lovink, et. al. eds, Melbourne: Fibreculture Publications, (8pp) 9–17

Selected Shows and Work, 2000–8
2007 ‘Struck’, (with Michele Barker) 3-channel DVD installation, Level 2 Contemporary Art Projects, Art Gallery of New South Wales, February 7 – March 22
July 30–September 3, 2007, Kickarts Contemporary Arts Centre, Cairns Queensland
May 17–June 4,
‘Remapped Realities’, March 17–April 30, group show, Eyebeam Gallery, New York.
2006 ‘Struck’ (with Michele Barker) winner National Digital Art Awards, “The Harries”,dynamic category, QUT Creative Industries Precinct, May 17–June 4
December 17 –30, 2006, International Digital Art Exhibition, Beijing Film Academy, Beijing, China
‘Assemblage for Collective Thought’, invited audiovisual remix performance with Andrew Murphie, 13th Intersociety for the Electronic Arts (ISEA2006), San Jose, USA, August 13
2005 ‘The Two of Us’, (with Michele Barker) two channel video and photomedia installation, The Butterfly Effect, group show, Sydney Festival, Australian Museum, January 6-February 28
2002 ‘wunderkammer’, interactive installation Aller Anfang (The Very Beginning), group show, Austrian Museum of Ethnology, Vienna, Austria, April – October
2001 ‘wundernet’, online artwork funded by the Australian Film Commission, http://wundernet.cofa.unsw.edu.au

3 Samples of writing
1. A Pdf file of the article ‘Net Affects: responding to shock on Internet time’,2001, Fibreculture: Politics of a Digital Present: An Inventory of Australian Net Culture, Criticism and Theory, H. Brown and G. Lovink, et. al. eds, Melbourne: Fibreculture Publications, 9–17
This can be downloaded at http://staff.cofa.unsw.edu.au/~annamunster/people/

This is an article that was published as a print piece in an anthology as its final version. However, the process of writing it took place on the online listserv ‘fibreculture’ during 2001. Regular posters posted and then the list community ‘reviewed’ and provided extensive feedback for development of the pieces into articles. It was an early example of real peer assessment of research writing in practice. The articles were then typeset and a reader was independently published. I have included the Acknowledgements section to give some idea of how the process took place.

For the next two samples please click on title of posts below

2. A post on my research blog
The Image in the Network. This piece has two comments from fellow research bloggers but also solicited a longer response by one of my fellow research bloggers Andrew Murphie
at Networks, Aesthetics and Aesthesia

3. A post on my research blog
Data Nonvisualisation which forms the background for the proposal for this piece for Networked_art.

Proposal for Networked_Art
Data undermining: the work of networked art in an age of imperceptibility

Abstract
The large quantities of data now being generated via networked communications are also being managed, regulated and interpreted into patterns that are comprehensible to humans. The management of data is undertaken by sophisticated sampling, tracking and automated techniques and the results of these are frequently sequestered to become the property of corporations and institutions such as Google or the US military. Even when data flows ‘freely’ through the net, the operations of search engines, databases, digest and feeds such as RSSs increasingly makes this manipulation of data invisible. Techniques such as aggregation smooth out the differentials of data’s constitution and present us instead with a flattened landscape of information. The sources, processes and contexts, which make information meaningful, are rendered imperceptible.

How have networked artistic practices responded to this emerging terrain of the imperceptible conditions for the generation of data? This ‘chapter’ will examine the work of online and offline networked art practices that seek to undermine the broader flow of data toward a general cultural state of imperceptibility. These artists render visible the real technical and social relations that comprise the production of data in networked culture. I hope to collaboratively think through these projects, zigzagging collectively through a mesh of artistic practice that makes the automatisms and aggregation of data palpably perceptible. A number of projects will be suggested for exploration: Antidatamining by the collective rybn.org; Antonio Muntadas’ ‘On Translation: Social Networks’; Eduardo Navas’ ‘Trace blog’; ShiftSpace. It is hoped that new projects will also come to light through networked participation.

Keywords: datamining; data visualisation;networked data management;imperceptibility; Web 2.0; networked art

1000 Word Proposal
The more data multiplies both quantitatively and qualitatively, the more it requires more than just visualisation. It also needs to be managed, regulated and interpreted into patterns that are comprehensible to humans. The labour of extracting pattern and order from data is rarely visualised for screen display in everyday life. The management of data is undertaken by sophisticated sampling, tracking and automated techniques and the results of these are frequently sequestered to become the property of corporations and institutions. Even when data flows do not become private or hidden property, their remixing and recombination in, for example, the web through the operations of search engines, databases, digest and feeds such as RSSs increasingly makes this manipulation of data invisible.

These mounting reserves of data about data, the software used to extract and analyse these and the social and cultural techniques accompanying this increasing trend results in a generalised data nonvisualisation. Whereas data visualisation characterised previous decades of digital culture in terms of tendencies in software development and the importance of the digital image, the invisibility of the processes involved in the manipulation of data is now ascendant. This is not to say that these techniques for aggregating and deciphering data do not use visualisation techniques. In the area of datamining particularly, visual environments can be modelled to make sense of patterns detected in sets of information. What is not visualised are the parameters, relations and arrangements that are used to organise and make sense of data.

The first phase of web development and design from 1995 to 2001 (Web 1.0) required designers and artists to be versed in at least a basic level of the then broadly used scripting language for displaying information online – HTML. In other words, during this early phase of web design there were no pre-packaged methods for formatting the way a web page was displayed. All graphic and stylistic elements had to be laid out in HTML scripting that ‘told’ the web browser how to format the page for online display. For a relatively short period, both artists and designers had a measure of access to the ‘source code’ of the web and this resulted in a lot of play with HTML aesthetics. From the mid-1990s, the artistic duo of Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans, known as ‘jodi.org’, became infamous for their collapse of the visual levels of web display into the underlying HTML level of source code.

Jodi.org furnish us with an aesthetic example that resists the contemporary cultural trend toward data nonvisualisation. Rather than using the graphic interface to obscure the underlying operations of computation, jodi.org’s work insists on using visual elements to foreground the complex historical, social and economic factors that lie embedded within contemporary ‘user-friendly’ interfaces. Nevertheless, web design and use has now moved toward less visible engagement – certainly for the everyday user – with the underlying architecture and flow of data through its various nodes and mechanisms.

Web 2.0 is a phrase used to denote the many changes that have taken place in the online environment after online cultures, commerce and everyday users regrouped in the post- dot.com context. At the core of the concept of Web 2.0 is the understanding of the network as an expanded field of interaction, interrelation and semantic generation between users, online infrastructure and software. (See O’Reilly, 2005). Aggregators are a common feature of the information landscape of Web 2.0 as they are: a) automated forms of operations previously carried out by human labour in the Web 1.0 environment; b) methods for dealing with the explosion of online information that followed the growth of blogs from around 2002 onward; and c) able to easily link and function in relation to the straight-to-web publishing environment that has become the mainstay of contemporary online transaction. Hence they provide a veneer of immediacy.

Users deploying such aggregators are usually not aware what the parameters are for extracting and determining pattern. The processes of making data meaningful in particular ways are never visualised or made explicit. Automatic aggregation tends to perform operations that reduce the relations between data to commonalities rather than differences. This may be of crucial importance in the aggregation of news data where conflicting rather than similar perspectives about an item actually comprise the information about it. But techniques such as aggregation smooth out these differentials and present us instead with a flattened landscape of information. The sources, processes and contexts, which make information meaningful, are rendered imperceptible.

How have networked artistic practices responded to this emerging terrain of the imperceptible conditions for the generation of data? This ‘chapter’ will examine the work of a series of online and offline networked art practices that seek to undermine the broader flow of data toward a general cultural state of imperceptibility. These artists render visible the real technical and social relations that comprise the production of data in networked culture. I hope to collaboratively think through these projects, zigzagging collectively through a mesh of artistic practice that makes the automatisms and aggregation of data palpably perceptible. A number of projects will be suggested for exploration: Antidatamining; Trace blog; On Translation: Social Networks; ShiftSpace. It is hoped that new projects will also come to light through networked contributions.

Some of this artistic practice verges on the social-political space of web knowledge generation. Yet it is precisely the question of the aesthetic that is put into play by the common approach of dataundermining the nonvisualised image terrain of contemporary information that these artists and collectives pursue. What these projects demand is a socio-aesthetic domain for data in which users, techniques and flows are not appropriated by a mindless automatism and in which the labour and work of all elements is not rendered imperceptible and, inevitably, irretrievable.

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