Application for artist in residence for the Sun/ICA New Media Centre

Synopsis

In-between
Informational Relationships and (within) Art (as) System(s)

Much of today's discourse on Artificial Life focuses on the technology, on the programming. It's simply a technical question of connecting the right software bits and autonomous life will exist. I want to project outward beyond the technical/mechanical issues and look to the broader social and cultural consequences. As an artist I don't want to recreate life but to hold up a mirror and try to catch some of the reflection. My role is one of instigator.

Information space has been the great symbolic achievement of our era and as artists, how do we come to terms with this? Where is the interface for the audience of our work and for us as artists, with information technology? 

What I want to do is initiate a small number of profiles for people. These might be termed information identities that exist only within information space. This will be done by subscribing to newsletters and magazines, opening accounts, e-mail etc, and returning junk mail, creating an information presence. The aim isn't to mislead or defraud but to see how information space reacts, to create real identities or a closer term, profiles. These profiles will have names and as the project progresses, almost by natural selection, will hopefully gain stature in the databanks, or information space, of marketing companies, banks and credit reference agencies, the information space where all our identities are being mapped.

These profiles will exist solely in information space, there can be no need for a physical presence, however as a way of disseminating information about the piece, a WWW web presence will be created logging details of the profiles.

Timescale

Though this would be conceived as an ongoing project the initial profiles would be completed within a three-month span.

Budget

I want to fix a budget of £1000 maximum per profile with an initial creation of 5 profiles. This will cover the creation costs of e-mail, postage, voice-mail, subscriptions etc.

In-between
Informational Relationships and (within) Art (as) System(s)

Art as illuminating force - Information as illuminating force

"If patterns of ones and zeroes were "like" patterns of human lives and deaths, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long string of ones and zeroes, then what kind of creature would be represented by a long string of lives and deaths? It would be up one level at least-an angel, a minor god, something in a UFO. It would take eight human lives and deaths just to form one character in this being's name-its complete dossier might take up a considerable piece of the history of the world..." Thomas Pynchon Vineland 1990

Though I believe that this piece will exist on several levels I feel the central issue is, how we as artists deal with our Information Society. How we 'see' art is changing, consequently how do we deal with art systems that are routed in new technology but have no visual, audible or tactile dimension. In the same way that information exhibits none of these things until we interface with it.

How do we construct new people, new identities not for ourselves but to examine our relationship with this new world? Artist models have traditionally been defined in charcoal or clay but what happens when we define people with information, preference settings and credit scoring? 

How do we make sense of information in this raw form? What is the proper use for this information? Much as the revisionist histories tell us, Kings and Queens aren't the only ones that leave trails that we can follow. Electronic information is now our social portraiture. 

Information as social affliction

If we were to examine the nature of the information gathering society we would find our one true achievement, the use to which we put this vast information space, Junk Mail. 

We don't control this virtual information space, but we can manipulate it, perhaps in a similar way that artists and others have previously played media pranks, and attempted to control and manipulate the media space occupied by TV and print.

The future is not simply recreating the present in virtual 3D space; asking the same questions in the secure knowledge that we already know what the answers will be (what its always been with knobs on). We need to find new ways of engaging with art, technology and information, ways of finding and engaging with today's focal points.

Last Updated 08 October 2000