Selected writing by David Topping

Information Gathering: Forms

Introduction

This period of study was composed of 10 days research and practice and 2 days reflection and documentation. Research included use of the Internet, library resources and visits to three major exhibitions in London. Practical work included working with application forms in a number of ways including photography, model making, printmaking, sketching and digital imaging.

I have focused this period on Loan Application Forms partly for their easy availability and partly for their societal importance. Structurally loan forms are kept quite short in contrast to something like Income Tax Self-Assessment forms and are physically sized at A4 or less. In this study I used forms from three banks, Barclays, Nat West and Abbey National.

Internet searches were performed on the following terms; 'Force Fields', 'Information Aesthetic', 'Intelligence', 'Joseph Kosuth', 'Machine Aesthetic', 'Margot Lovejoy', 'Panamarenko', 'Gerhard Richter', 'Software', 'Standardised Forms', 'The Information Age - Artists', 'The Machine as seen at the End of the Mechanical Age', 'Tomoko Takahashi', 'Thomas Locher', 'Peter Halley', 'Agnes Denes' and 'Web Names'. These will be discussed in more detail at a later date. Useful points emerged in the work of Art Historian Edward Shanken from Duke University and the fact that a number of people, who appear relevant to this study, including Shanken, Lovejoy and Kosuth, all presented at the Consciousness Reframed Conference at Newport in 1998. The creation of this research archive will form the basis for a review of relevant source material.

Library resources were used to order reprints of journals articles on the exhibition Information staged at New York's Museum of Modern Art, July 2-September 20, 1970. These articles, David Shapiro's Mr. Processionary at the Conceptacle from Art News and Informative Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art by Gregory Battcock, along with the chapter The Electronic Era and Postmodernism in Margot Lovejoy's Postmodern Currents: Art and Artists in the Age of Electronic Media, have provided much for further development. This particular period of time appears to be at the root of the association of Conceptual Art and Information. Jack Burnham is an important figure both as the curator of the exhibition Software, Information Technology: Its New Meaning for Art at the Jewish Museum also in 1970 and as an art critic. Two relevant publications are The Structure of Art published in 1971 and Art and Technology: The Panacea that Failed in Kathleen Woodward's (Ed.) The Myths of Information: Technology and Postindustrial Culture published in 1980. Software was constructed of, and drew parallels between, computer information technology, conceptual art practice, and structuralist art theory, and was predicated on the idea of software as a metaphor for art. Software was designed to function, moreover, as a testing ground for public interaction with "information processing systems and their devices."¹

I visited Intelligence at Tate Britain, Force Fields: Phases of the Kinetic at the Hayward Gallery and Between Cinema and a Hard Place at Tate Modern. One interesting element was the number of artists whose work appears in Force Fields who also appeared in one or more of the key exhibitions mentioned above, including Hans Haacke and Agnes Denes's. Curated by Guy Brett it presents us with kinetic art as an expanded field, an open terrain, rather than anything we can call a consolidated movement something I feel is probably the case with Information Art. 

Practice

aesthetic noun [in sing.] a set of principles underlying and guiding the work of a particular artist or artistic movement

At the beginning of this period I decided to concentrate my practical work on two aspects, artistic mark making and the geometric layout structure. This meant experimenting through hand drawing elements of the form and manipulating the layout of both the text and boxes.

A number of experiments were undertaken in recreating the form as a hand drawn object. Barclayloan Application Form #1 was the first attempt at this. This was followed by versions with larger sized nibs and in varying colours. Barclayloan Application Form #2 attempted to recreate the form using a much thicker nib partly to gauge the visual effect once the text/boxes began to touch and merge. I felt it important to keep reminding myself that the exploration of data or information gathering was the primary aim in this period of study. As soon as you start to manipulate the form in any way you start subverting the clarity and ease of use of a form. The primary way to avoid this is focus solely on the use of language and the structure of the text on the form. Using this to improve the clarity of understanding should improve clarity or ease of gathering, though it is not guaranteed to. Using an application form from Abbey National I did a series of experiments on the abstracted geometry of the boxes as in Abbeyloan Application Form #1. Abbeyloan Application Form #5 recreated the form as a 3D object in white card. The box spaces became recesses. The emphasis here was explicitly architectural, the model acting as a sketch of a formal structure, perhaps a garden, the recesses as water features. Within this model the recesses can act as receptacles to gather physical objects, and may be seen as a metaphor for information gathering. In addition are the obvious parallels between the geometry of a form, microchips and city plans based on a grid system. 

In the course of this research I came across the work of the Peter Halley, born New York 1953. This work, primarily paintings, has a strong geometric basis which is described in an the accompanying text to an exhibition at the Waddington Galleries, "His starting point is a conception of geometry as a metaphor for society. The elements of his iconography are rectangular cell units, linked by linear conduits, which represent the individual organisms and networks of contemporary urban existence."² In Collected Essays 1981-87³ he lists notes on his 1982 paintings, "1. These are paintings of prisons, cells, and walls. 2. Here, the idealist square becomes the prison. Geometry is revealed as confinement. 3. The cell is a reminder of the apartment house, the hospital bed, the school desk-the isolated endpoints of industrial structure. 4. The paintings are a critique of idealist modernism. In the 'colour field' is placed a jail. The misty space of Rothko is walled up. 5. Underground conduits connect the units. 'Vital fluids' flow in and out. 6. The 'stucco' texture is a reminiscence of motel ceilings. 7. The Day-Glo paint is a signifier of 'low budget mysticism.' It is the afterglow of radiation."⁴ This is a perspective that requires further investigation, especially the notions of the cell, confinement, and of fluid connectivity. Should we think about the box on a form in a similar light, not as receptacle but as an isolation field, designed to separate its contents from the rest of society? The contents are then protected with only 'authorised' flows of data in and out. Forms were certainly developed to reduce non-standard information or reporting. In Technopoly Neil Postman sites Beniger and says, "Beniger notes, for example, that the invention of the standardized form-a staple of bureaucracy-allows for the "destruction" of every nuance and detail of a situation. By requiring check boxes and fill in blanks, the standardized form admits only a limited range of formal, objective, and impersonal information, which in some cases is precisely what is needed to solve a particular problem."⁵ Beniger talks about this control of flow as rationalisation, "…most definitions are subsumed by one essential idea: control can be increased not only by increasing the capability to process information but also by decreasing the amount of information to be processed. The former approach to control was realized in Weber's day through bureaucratization and today increasingly through computerization; the latter approach was then realized through rationalization, what computer scientists now call preprocessing."⁶

The Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien describes Halley's work thus, "Peter Halley's paintings, which have been labelled >Neo-Geo<, must be seen against the backdrop of Abstract Expressionism of the 50s, from which he, however, intentionally disassociates himself. Halley's paintings do not make the idealistic claim of referring to anything totally different; his squares have no metaphysical significance, but they reflect - in a sort of counter-position he has titled them >Prisons< - the loneliness of the individual in the big metropolis who is caught in a web of communication dominated by abstract structures. The city with its streets, sewers, telephone lines and water mains appears as a 'geometric machine', a 'network of cells and supply lines', whose controlling and dominating function is visualised by Halley."⁷

For the second set of experiments with the Abbey National form I used filters within Adobe PhotoShop for rapid prototyping of a number of techniques to breakdown the formal structure of the form and look for other dominant visual elements. Abbeyloan Application Form #8 is one example that used the median filter to enhance the underlying blocks of colour. The resulting image retains some elements of the original while the bleed begins to resemble the test sheets from DNA or other techniques that require a liquid medium. The primary purpose of the form is data or information gathering and any investigation has to keep this in mind. There are many simple ways of subverting this process, from replacing the question's asked, removing them altogether, making the boxes too small to enter any text or making the boxes entirely black. Though some of these may be interesting initially at least I wish to avoid subverting the process simply for its own sake.

The most appealing images for me are Barclayloan Application Form #1 and Barclayloan Application Form #13. The hand drawn lines on BAF #1 remind me of mediaeval monks spending year's hand copying pages. Though it retains all the information of the original it has lost its authority to function in its original context. This is opposite to most artwork where the machine copy is devalued from the artist's original or hand made copy. Is it valued as an object because of the amount of time taken to create it? It isn't 'illuminated' in a mediaeval sense, and no attempt has been made to prettify it. Is it that a connection back to a human is implicit in the hand drawn line that gives it value? There is a human in there somewhere and not just a machine. If that is the case then we could say that it is successful in commenting on and challenging the impersonal nature of information gathering. The nature of people doing surveys in shopping centres seems impersonal even though it's a person doing the asking. We are aware that they are simply ticking and checking boxes on a form. Does a hand drawn form suddenly become to valuable to use, losing its disposability? Is it about feeling that we matter, that someone, somewhere, has bothered? "Information," David Israel & John Perry hold, "typically involves a fact [a sign, as I would put it] indicating something about the way things are elsewhere and elsewhen⁸, and this is what makes information useful and interesting."⁹ 

The action of using a form is composed of writing or marking. So does a completed form hold more value than a blank one? Is it just the time taken that gives it value? Or is it that it now contains information? If so then who does it hold value for? The form filler already has that information so it is hard to see what putting it down in this particular format is adding. However the form now has value in the transference of information for the filler to the recipient.

Barclayloan Application Form #13 comprises the complete content of the blank form repositioned to appear on the same line. From a distance this starts to resemble some other kind of information, specifically looking like the results of a DNA sequencing test. Most of the text is now unintelligible though the odd fragment shows through. The form takes on meaning without needing the filling in of the boxes as the questions themselves take on this role. Is it that the questions themselves are the true answers? 

Overall I felt that five weeks was not sufficient time to cover this area in any depth. Although a number of interesting areas began to emerge there was no time to develop them in a way that I would have liked to. I felt similarly about the amount of time for reflection and documentation. During the reflection period a number of ideas presented themselves and the temptation was to return immediately to the practical side and try some of them out, though the process was more iterative than linear.

You fill in a form because you want or desire something, a car, a job, a house or protection. Standardised forms camouflage a significant number of problems in this. They filter out responses from people with different or opposing answers and unique properties and differences. They make it almost impossible to encompass conditions that are in transition. Trying to fit diverse interests into a single, standardised form makes no more sense than requiring everyone in a town to wear the same sized shoes. In addition standardised forms have evolved into a kind of social and economic bludgeon. Descriptions, such as a particular document is "our standard agreement", are frequently used. Additionally the very idea of "standard" implies certain values. After all, if something is standard, are not alternate approaches "unstandard" or perhaps substandard? In many systems standardized forms are treated with the awe and reverence usually reserved for sacred objects. They're so "official" that all too often we believe such forms are untouchable. Yet no matter how imposing a form may look, in itself it is just a piece of paper, any value is in its social constructs. Signing a standardised form gives permanence to the responses on the form and because of the simplification of process gives more weight than the signing of a freeform response. The action is now set in stone. 

Key this study the need to divorce the idea of information gathering from the aesthetic of the computer, of 1's and 0's, microchips and circuit boards, monitors, keyboards, and floppy disks. However these designs are modelled on an underlying geometry and structure that is present in other societal systems.

Points to consider, question and develop further

• The banality of evil, standardised processing and The Holocaust as information problem
• The use of natural material to subvert the notion of standardisation. Such as forms grown from grass, or the use of dust (Would this have any relevance to Duchamp's large glass being on a window ledge for 7 years, or to Agnes Denes's Buck of Dust?) or the growing of plants. Can we grow information or data in the same way we grow plants? Is it more like forensic evidence when data or information is assembled over time?
• Permanence and the power of a signature to signify
• The use of other terminology or outside force to alter a form or the responses. This may include my other terms; aesthetic, containment, desire, difference, dislocation, dysfunction, domestication, faith and trace. Are these the most useful terms to use?
• What things cannot be processed in an information age or by standardised forms? The flip side of this would be using a form to select the most important things in life. A new baby by tick box. Eyes: Blue, Brown, Green, Grey? The closet parallel at the moment would be choosing a spouse by tick box, something that happens with dating agencies.
• Is a form more like a photograph taking a "slice of time" or more like a painting giving an impression built up over time. Is presupposes consistency and the static rather than transitory nature of information.
• With complex, precise, hand-drawn work is it the amount of work/time involved that makes it impressive and in the age of computers why would anyone bother to do it by hand? Does the value lay in the fact that someone has bothered?
• Types of questions asked 
• Reduction of questions to one ultimate question
• A Standardised form is a tool for the control of information. More specifically they are an element of the pre-processing stage of an information system. They allow qualitative information (our lives) to be reduced to quantitative information (a systems view of our lives). 
• A circle instead of a box system for entering your information. 
• The ultimate aesthetic for a standardised form is the single character box, requiring only 1 bit of information, the yes or no answer. Anything else requires more than the optimal amount of processing; Name [Yes] Date of Birth [Yes] Occupation [No].

1. Burnham, J. 1970. Notes on Art and Information Processing. In Software Information Technology: Its New Meaning for Art. New York: Jewish Museum, p. 10 ^
2. http://www.waddington-galleries.com/ARTIST/HALL/SHALL.HTM [extracted 2-9-2000] ^
3. Halley, P. 2000. Collected Essays 1981-87. Zurich: Gallery Bruno Bischofberger ^
4. Ibid. p. 23 ^
5. Postman, N. 1993. Technopoly: the surrender of culture to technology. New York: Vintage Books. p. 84 ^
6. Beniger, J. 1986. The Control Revolution: technological and economic origins of the information society. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. p.84 ^
7. http://www.mmkslw.or.at/MMKSLW/english/sammlung/halley.htm [extracted 2-9-2000] ^
8. I would like to use this idea of elsewhere and elsewhen as the basis for my talk at the Space & Place research day ^
9. Borgmann, A. 1999. Holding on to Reality: the nature of information at the turn of the millennium. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. p. 14 ^

Last Updated 08 October 2000