The Anti-Sublime Ideal in Data Art

Jeff Ginger | Art Studio 444 | 03.08.07
A response to Lev Manovich's work

I was generally finding this reading rather straight forward and unremarkable until page three. Here the author makes the claim (in reference to new methodologies of visualization representation and selection of dimensions) that “these new questions about data mapping are now as important as more traditional questions about the politics of media representation”. I couldn’t disagree more. The power dynamics inherent in the discrimination and the astronomical influence of the media on society are ten fold what any power disparities in choice and use of dimension could ever pray to be. You’ve got to be kidding me. How we choose to visualize WinAmp isn’t even comparable to racism, sexism, the television induced mass fear mentality of America, classism, the borg-like force of consumerism and unprecedented impacts of globalization. I actually find a preposterous statement like this downright offensive if not absurdly ignorant. The two power disparities are not comparable and I don’t believe that they run parallel at all. The fact of the matter is that data and people are not the same – what data we select and how we portray it is important, but not in the same realm of expressions of entire peoples, countries, and ethnicities. Data visualizations don’t cause wars or become the driving force behind religions or construct the in-group out-group basis of the web of social interactions as we know it. The representation of people – visually and otherwise – is not the same as the representation of data – visually or otherwise. Apples to Oranges my friends.

There’s a causal relationship at work here. The ‘old politics of media representation’ remain the foundation of the new ones. If a certain people or culture were not represented in the first place then they could not be subject to this sort of revolution of representation. The power dynamics, social stratification and institutionalized inequities put into place by sexism, religious persecution, slavery, anti-immigration laws, discrimination against mentally ill, retarded, or disabled people, ageism, and the whole anamorphous & regenerating Gordian knot of issues at play external to the US are still hard at work long before we reinterpret them. In my mind the two are therefore inseparable. Had we attended to some of the issues of disparity before entering into this digitally inspired redefining of the old world then we might have been able to make claims of a new more important set of power relationships. But we haven’t attended to those issues, those inequalities and those structures and as such will get to tackle them in whatever form they come in – be it in this world or the next.

Once I press past this fatally flawed initial assumption I do actually like some of the concepts the author constructs in the work. The idea of software that allows “the user to generate descriptions of this [original media structures] and to change this structure.”

So creating new conglomerations or stories comprised of media built out of the old forms of media – a sort of dynamic (animated and interactive) scrap books built not of pictures but of films, sounds, pictures, and spaces. That unto itself really is a considerable question – how does one visualize that?