 | ||
project text | ||
|
P r o j e c t T e x t [ G r a p h i n g a P e r m a n e n t F l u x ] Newsdrip documents the shifting emphasis and subject matter of the online news media. It is as much an index of significance as it is of the ephemeral. The idea was very simple - to read the front pages of a number of online news sources, scan the text for place names and then plot their frequency of occurrence onto the surface of two counterposed maps. The first of the maps was to represent the world as seen from a Western perspective (focus UK). A second was to represent the world as seen from the East (focus Iran). The data for each of the maps would be drawn from news sources originating from the appropriate locale. The Newsdrip project has been in production for a number of years. With every stage of development it has edged further towards its physical realisation. In this sense, the project, like its content, has a quality of process or flux. The focus for the ISIS residency (stage two of the project) was to develop a kind of virtual maquette that would enable us to convey the workings of the final installation and also to begin work on some of the programming that would contribute towards its eventual realisation. Since the CRISIS exhibition the project has been substantially developed and many of the issues appertaining to the production of the final piece have been resolved. It is now less an illustration of the installation and more a tool for its maintenance and for the browsing of its data. The final work is to be a kinetic, networked, water-based installation. Two maps will be drawn onto the floor of an enclosed space submerged beneath shallow water. Droplets will fall from the ceiling onto the surface of the water. The falling water will illustrate points of immediate geographical/political significance. The rate of dripping will vary with the frequency of the occurrence of recognised nouns (London, US, Sudan, Quom etc.) and this will create a number of sites of disturbance. The result should be a highly aesthetic, physical form of graphing - a representation of the culturally significant with a visual, temporal and acoustic richness. The project emerges out of two very different forms of representation. Our earliest experiments were derived from manually dripping food colouring into bowls of water. We were interested in observing the ways in which ripples would behave - their ebbs, their flows and the means by which they might maintain a particular sphere of influence. There was a warmth to this form of depiction that was lost in our later experiments with graphing the occurrence of nouns over time in online news reports. The pixel, cold and homogenous, is not expressive at the material level. Our graphs though clinical in appearance are nevertheless engaging in another sense. They treat the flux of Internet news reports as an ever-developing literary concordance. The undulations of any particular noun can be charted as it progresses and recedes over time. The collating of these frequencies retrospectively reveals a kind of temporal linguistic structure - an index of collective media attention. The patterns that emerge seem at times surreal. In a year that had seen the outbreak of a war, the noun that showed the highest statistical peak from perspective of the UK focus was the word 'Christmas'. There is a sense in which the piece is a kind of narrative work. Whilst performing keyword searches, the original news reports remain hidden. All that is revealed is the fluctuation of a term over time. The audience, having only partial information must engage in a process of imaginative reconstruction of day to day events. Likewise they may only speculate upon how affairs might proceed. These aspects of the work serve to emphasis the ways in which data becomes something more than itself when it intersects with human attention[2]. The Newsdrip is founded on an overlapping of personal memory, expectation and the seeming authority of the archive. Through the application of an identical mechanical process to a pair of idiosyncratic sources it begins to reveal the mediation of national attention and the distortions of parochial focus. The concepts of field and framework bring with them two very different models of time - both of which are engaged to some extent by the work. In one sense the charting of statistical frequencies from day to day foregrounds a highly analytical and linear temporal framework. A series of frequencies cross-referenced with equidistant units of measurement. This is a graph to be viewed from the outside - which is to say it is a graph to be viewed from a transcendent perspective. In another sense, however, the project is intimately bound up with the notion of the field. A field is by definition in constant process. It is not in any sense a fixed entity - it is rather an expression of change. The use of water - with its associations with Heraclitian flux - serves to emphasis the ephemeral and the changeability of the moment. Both the physical installation and the tool used to administer its workings represent the moment as a multiplicity of interpenetrating durations. In his works 'Duration and Simultaneity', and 'Matter and Memory', Henri Bergson writes of time as being composed of a number of separate yet simultaneous rhythms or fluxes [1]. He sketches a picture of a riverbank and uses it as a means of introducing the diverse temporal rhythms of the flowing water, a bird in flight and the internal time of the observer. There is a sense in which the Newsdrip project extends this thought into an informational space - each of the nouns having its own degree of tension - each reflecting its degree of prominence in day to day affairs. There is no ideal vantage point from which to observe the work - there is no all encompassing 'view from nowhere' for the audience to acquire. The Newsdrip can be surveyed from many different perspectives - each revealing a facet of an unobservable whole. The views from the perimeter are only as valuable as the views from within. In this sense the piece has a quality of immanence - each separate water drip being both in and of the field. There is a sense in which some digital work seems to extend the kinetic tradition. The Newsdrip is a reactive structure that is influenced by a number of fields of information. It is not interactive in the sense of giving expression to any specific individual's agency or desire - but there is an important sense in which it reacts to the media and provokes further reaction in its audience. In this sense it might be considered as a kinetic work with a longer, networked reach. In closing it is worth asking something of the concept of information - this being the very substance of the Newsdrip project. The term 'information' has great contemporary currency (Information Broker, Information Architect, Information Age) despite having a series of contested definitions. There are two, more contemplative, but nevertheless important questions that can be derived from considering the form of the Newsdrip project. The first, which should really have an obvious answer, is the substantive question 'What is information?' Reflecting upon this deceptively simple query for any amount of time, we find ourselves moving in circles. An answer seems to be always on the tip of the tongue but proves nevertheless elusive. The second - more worrying, and perhaps less frequently voiced than its predecessor- is the more politically oriented question 'What is Information for?' [3] [1] Bergson Henri. Duration and Simultaneity. Clinamen Press, 1999 [2] Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual. Duke University Press, 2002 [3] Midgley, Mary. Wisom, Information and Wonder, Routledge, 1989
Next Section
| ||
| overview | installation | project text | links |