This essay focuses on a broad topic of new media archives, archival technologies, the concept of database, its aesthetics, hypertext, as well as media archeology. Via analysis of some of the ideas claimed by the most influencing theoreticians in the field, it explores the idea of an ‘open secret’ (Foucault in Krapp 2006: 369) and it’s relationship to the above branches of new media inquiry.
Christiane Paul, in her piece on digital art believes that the term “database aesthetics” is often used to describe the “aesthetic principles applied in imposing the logic of the database to any type of information, filtering data collections, and visualizing data (Paul, 2007: 95). She believes that database aesthetics often becomes a conceptual potential and cultural form — a way of revealing (visual) patterns of knowledge, beliefs, and social behavior (Paul, 2007: 95). She also believes that the aesthetics of the database are a structure itself, although it certainly implies that meaning and the structure of a database is inherently connected to the results produced by the filtering of the data contained in it and the nature of its visualization. (Paul, 2007: 95).
According to the author “(…) visualization and “dynamic mapping” of real-time data streams has become a broad area of inquiry in digital art” (2007: 99). Following this notion, applying the keyword database to visual arts, gaming, music, and culture in general, produces an enormous field of inquiry for both the arts, humanities and mathematics. Finally, the author claims that “database structure in the broadest sense lies at the root of digital media, it is only natural that database aesthetics play a major role in digital art and culture” (2007: 108).
She also believes that the common theme for “database aesthetics” seems to be more focused on the operations happening on the “front end” — the concept of the algorithms, its visual manifestations, and cultural implications — rather than the “back end” of the data container and its structure (Paul, 2007: 97). This is where one can notice that the way in which the author approaches database aesthetics is strongly linked to the artist, his visual expression and the incredibly vast amounts of information carried by the manifested data visualization.
Soon after, Paul notices one of the main points of Krapp’s claim: the potential of data for being infinite or unbound – open. She claims that: “one of the inherent characteristics of digital art is the tension between the mostly linear and hierarchical structure of databases (or the Internet’s territory as a multitude of servers with hierarchical directories) and instructions, on the one hand, and, on the other, the seemingly infinite possibilities for reproducing and reconfiguring the information contained within these structures” (Paul, 2007: 97).
The author focuses further on the idea of aesthetics of a database as intrinsically relational, either on the level of its potential or the actual relationships established by the software element (2007: 98). Shortly explaining this claim, one should keep in mind that the aesthetics of databases are an even more expansive concept than the database field itself. This leads the author to her next claim about “the possibilities of tracing process individual, cultural, communicative—in its various forms” (2007: 98). Following the words of Paul, “the understanding of a database as the underlying principle and structure of any new media object delineates a broad field that includes anything from a network such as the Internet to a particular data set (2007: 98-99), providing the artist or scientist in charge of the set with constantly expanding material for practice as well as a rapidly growing diverse field of analysis.
Christiane Paul believes that database aesthetics became somewhat of a characteristic of our times of rapid information flow, reaching beyond the digital and transcending the traditional archives of the library and museum. Most importantly, she claims “the notion of relational databases as an organizational model seems increasingly to infiltrate culture” (2007: 108), presenting this phenomenon on a global scale.
Relating the concept of relational database and its aesthetics to the idea of “openness” touched by Krapp, I find most important to cite Paul’s grand statement where she claims the notions of data, collection and network as tied together within a fresh term of relational database aesthetics:
Largely brought about by digital technologies, database aesthetics itself has become an important cultural narrative of our time, constituting a shift toward a relational, networked approach to gathering and creating knowledge about cultural specifics.
(Paul, 2007: 108)
Sven Spieker, the second of the analyzed authors, in his critical analysis of the archive presents a far more grave stance towards a similar topic. While focusing on the archive’s content, the author notices that conventionally “the records stored in archives fulfilled a legal function”. Nonetheless, over time archives changed from being “legal depositories” into “institutions of historical research”. According to Spieker the archive shifted into a hybrid institution based in public administration and historical research (Spieker, 2008: xii).
Following, he presents some obstacles related to the topic, previously left behind by Paul. Spieker believes that when an archive has an objective to collect everything, because any object may become useful in the future, the archive itself will drop into chaos, a state of entropy and irrational change. As he notices, “there are cases when feedback does not produce a higher degree of stability but, on contrary, leads to chaos. In such cases the system begins to swing back and forth so violently that it finally collapses. This (…) is a state of entropy that symbolizes, more generally, the archive’s precarious position between order and chaos, between organization and disorder, between the presence of the voice and the muteness of object (Spieker, 2008: xiii). The above quote may be seen as a relation to the openness aspect analyzed by Paul, but this particular thought also carries the logics or what Krapp referred to as “open secret”. Even though entering a state of chaotic consuming of its subjects or any other kind of absorbing vast amounts of information, the previously described openness is followed by the unpredictable; the mentioned chaos of surrounding data – the overload of positions carrying a thought of secrecy.
Developing the topic further while analyzing the work of Bouvard and Pecuchet , Spieker exposes the idea of chaos – multiple archives within archives – a direct relation to the questioned oxymoron of an “open secret”:
There is, then, no position from which data collected by the two characters could be referred to tht is not that of the archive. Whenever such a position – a position outside of their endeavor, outside of the collection they have established – comes within reach, they quickly discover that it is itelf yet part of another archive, another discipline or field of knowledge that has to be studied, inventoried, and mastered. The maddening conundrum faced by Bouvard and Pecuchet is that everything that can be known is already archival. (Bouvard and Pecuchet in Spieker, 2008: 33)
This grand conclusion is followed by a final definition of an archive as a storehouse for knowledge. So called by the author “the modern archive” (as a mirror image to the previously described relational databases) denotes a place outside of itself. “But this beyond-the-archive is not a transcendent outside or an empty space waiting to be filled; it is yet in fact another archive” (Spieker, 2008: 33).
To sum up the thoughts of the most influencing theoreticians covering the fields of archives, technologies, databases, its aesthetics, hypertext, and media archeology; the discussed oxymoron of an “open secret” can be explained either as a single concept or as two distinct characteristics of aesthetics or functioning of hypertext within modern archives or databases. The idea of openness can be seen in the collective gathering of knowledge, tendency for a universal language, and constantly expanding growth and interconnectivity. This is interrelated with the notion of secrecy, a chaotic trap of archives within archives, and a misleading entropy of data flows. The above ideas tied together create a notion where new media studies and media art aesthetics based on the concept of archive in general, are caught in a dangerous trap of constant growth of information and production of meaning.
Bibliography and Readings:
Lev Manovich, ‘The Database as Symbolic Form’, in The Language of New Media, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001, pp. 218-243.
Christiane Paul, ‘The Database as System and Cultural Form: Anatomies of Cultural Narratives’, in Victoria Vesna (ed.) Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007, pp. 95-109.
Peter Krapp, ‘Hypertext Avant La Lettre’, in Wendy Chun and Thomas Keenan (eds) New Media/Old Media: A History and Theory Reader, London: Routledge, 2006, pp. 359-373.
Sven Spieker, The Big Archive: Art From Bureaucracy, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008, pp. ix-34.
Geert Lovink, 'Archival Rumblings: Interview with German Media Archaeologist Wolfgang Ernst', Nettime (2003), http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0302/msg00132.html
Siegfried Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media: Toward a Media Archaeology of Seeing and Hearing by Technical Means, trans. Gloria Custance, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006, pp. 1-38.
Garnet Hertz and Jussi Parikka, 'Zombie Media: Circuit Bending Media Archaeology into an Art Method', Leonardo [forthcoming]
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