Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
The artist Mark Lombardi is known for his large scale data based drawings or
“narrative structures” which detail the networks of power and money involved in
various political financial scandals such as the collapse of the Bank of Credit and
Commerce International detailed in
BCCI-ICIC-FAB, c. 1972-1991, (4th Version),
1996-2000.
For each drawing Mark Lombardi built a custom database culled
from published information sources assembled onto cross referenced index cards,
according to his gallerist Deven Golden, he had around 14,000 of them (
2003
),
which were then condensed to create his drawings. Lombardi considered these
as a method of “reprocessing and rearranging” freely available information as a
way of mapping the political and social terrain (Wegener
2011
). The painter Greg
Stone recounts the reaction of a friend, a reporter at the Wall St Journal, on seeing
Lombardi's G
eorge W. Bush, Harken Energy and Jackson Stephens
drawing, who
although he was familiar with the characters in the narrative, said he “hadn't fully
understood the implications until he saw it all laid out that way” (Richard
2002
).
Josh On's web based work
They Rule
(Fig.
4.1
) pursues a similar mission
of making connections between networks of powerful individuals, this time con-
nected though corporate directorships once again drawing from publicly available
databases.
They Rule
provides a front-end interface to its underlying databases
which allows users to make their own connections and share them with other users.
As a work of art it presents a framework to interface with the data, inviting its
audience to provide the narrative structure and co-construct the meaning. Originally
powered from a custom database of directorships of the top 100 companies in the
US, it now employs the database of
Littlesis
, “a free database of who-knows-who at
the heights of business and government”.
4
These projects illustrate that the power of data art lies in its ability to re-
present information in ways which make the connections evident, presenting the
information as narrative and revealing the underlying structures and patterns. How
then can ubiquitous networked location-awareness of mobile devices and emergent
AR techniques add to this tradition, and in an era where data and its use has assumed
a greater importance than ever before, what has art practice to contribute to this
field? This raises issues of site specificity and the reality of site being described
not only as specific location, which the situated artwork addresses, but also as the
invisible layers of data which extend our knowledge of the complex and multi-
layered interactions between site, information and audience.
At this point I introduce a case study of a project by this author which follows in
the tradition of data art. It is a work which doesn't claim any technical innovation,
created for an existing platform and built using free and open source software, but it
offers a powerful example of the ways in which data can politically (and artistically)
activate sites and, I suggest, a model for connecting data and space to create an
activist hybrid-space (Harrison and Dourish
1996
; Kluitenberg
2006
).
4
See littlesis.org
