Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination: January 2010

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Infodecodata

More hard drive-based art: Infodecodata has issued an open call for participants to generate treemap images of their hard drives using their Sequoia visualization software and upload them to an online exhibition gallery.

There is a clear lineage here that includes Carlo Zanni's You Are Your C (see below), Mary Flanagan's Phage and Cory Arcangel's Data Diaries, all discussed in Mechanisms.

Sunday, January 3, 2010

Endless Nameless

Somewhere in Mechanisms I suggest that the hard drive has been under-utilized as a platform (in its own right) for digital art. I mention a couple of pieces like "Your Are Your C" by Carlo Zanni, and speculate that we will see more.

From Danny Snelson comes word of "Endless Nameless," a collaborative project that involves stocking used hard drives with data assemblages and selling them, iTunes-like, for .99/GB:

Endless Nameless presents a double articulation of popular data trafficking along with the material histories of our digitally dislocated artifacts. Cataloging this 'nude media' by original source, the book loops these distribution circuits in a nostalgic allegory of publication: celebrating the publishers while disseminating huge amounts of unsanctioned information.

I like it. I just can't afford it.

"Mechanisms is at the cutting edge of second generation scholarship on digital media and electronic literature. After the first generation's inflated claims and broad generalities, Mechanisms leads the way with precise, rigorous analysis both of the nature of digital media and of important works created in networked and programmable platforms. An essential work for anyone interested in the electronic literature, digital arts, and culture in the digital age."
--N. Katherine Hayles, Department of English, University of California, Los Angeles

"Very few scholars have a precise understanding of the symmetries and asymmetries that define the relation of paper-based and digital technologies. Now when we need that kind of understanding, we are weathering a perfect storm raised by the long neglect of philological discipline, on one hand, and avoidance of any practical understanding of computerized resources on the other. Kirschenbaum's lucid book engages trenchantly with these important and pressing matters. It will wake its neighbors up."
--Jerome McGann, University of Virginia

"At last in Kirschenbaum's Mechanisms we have our tactical plan for thinking inside the black box of digital media, for moving past 'screen studies' to a new take on electronic media informed by deep understanding of technological practices of inscription and storage. Kirschenbaum introduces a fresh and enlightening dichotomy, that of the interplay of formal and forensic inscription. This dichotomy becomes the raw material for cutting the key to a new critical apparatus for unlocking studies of digital media."
--Henry Lowood, Curator for History of Science & Technology Collections, Germanic Collections, and Film & Media Collections, Stanford University Libraries

"Kirschenbaum's book is the most rigorous, cohesive, historically informed, materially grounded, and theoretically interesting treatment of textual artifacts in the age of digital mutation that I have yet encountered. The book introduces completely new materials and unique archival and site-specific research within an innovative methodological framework blending the new textual scholarship with the equally new discipline of digital forensics. Mechanisms is destined to be a landmark work for the field of digital textual studies in the same way that Lev Manovich's Language of New Media was for the digital arts and new media fields."
--Alan Liu, Department of English, University of California, Santa Barbara

Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Infodecodata

Sunday, January 3, 2010

Endless Nameless

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