Data Performativity: Rethinking Liveness in Network Art

by Winnie Soon School of Arts and New Media, University of Hull, UK

Saturday, 23 March 2013

What is liveness?

Saturday, 23 March 2013

Liveness in Photography

“its precise degree of closeness and its exact relationship to its referent and the real”

(Dixon, 2007, p.116)

“Every Photograph is a certificate of presence”

(Barthes, 1981, p.87)

Saturday, 23 March 2013

Live TV Broadcast

- Reality

- Performing / Acting / Moving

- Presence (time & space)

Saturday, 23 March 2013

Liveness in the Internet

The demand of live is pervasive:

“the need to connect oneself, with others, to the world’s events, is central to the development of the modern nation.”

(Bourdon, 2000, p.552)

Saturday, 23 March 2013

Conception of Liveness

• The representation of data

• Reproduction: Recorded technologies

• “We often perceive reality only through the mediation of machines.”(Bolz & Van Reijen, 1996, p.71)

Saturday, 23 March 2013

Conception of Liveness

“live is actually an effect of mediatization... It was the development of recording technologies that made it possible to perceive existing representation as ‘live.’”

(Auslander, 2008, p.56)

Saturday, 23 March 2013

Conception of Liveness

Existing issues:

- human-centered

- Perceptible

Saturday, 23 March 2013

Network Art - jsut code

Saturday, 23 March 2013

Network Art - jsut code

• What is live data?

• What is live in relation to time?

• What is live in relation to the machinic process?

Saturday, 23 March 2013

Research on Liveness

• nonhuman and/or collaborative forces

• Machinic process

• Imperceptible

• Beyond visual and other forms of representation

Saturday, 23 March 2013

Questions

• How might we think about liveness in nonhuman sense?

• What might be the nonhuman forces?

Saturday, 23 March 2013

“Computer are processors, in a sense, mobile machines. There’s a fluidity to digital data: processing involves data in motion. These processes of navigation or motion relate to the depth of electronic forms.”

(Mcpherson, 2006, p.202)

nonhuman forces

Saturday, 23 March 2013

• Performativity of data

• politics of code

• dynamics of the network

• reading and writing the database

nonhuman forces

Saturday, 23 March 2013

Network Art / Culture

The notion of Live and cultural data become commodities

Saturday, 23 March 2013

Data Performativity: Rethinking liveness in Network Art

• To what extent, the forces of network/entities/code/technology reconfigure the conception of liveness?

Saturday, 23 March 2013