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Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art
Information
An art-historical reassessment of information-based art and exhibition curation, from 1960s conceptualism to current digital and network-based practices. This anthology provides the first art-historical reassessment of information-based art in relation to data structures and exhibition curation. It examines such landmark exhibitions as “Information” at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1970, and the equally influential “Les Immatériaux,” initiated by the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, in 1984. It reexamines work by artists of the 1960s to early 1980s, from Les Levine and N. E. Thing Co. to General Idea and Jenny Holzer, whose prescient grasp of information's significance resonates today. It also reinscribes into the narrative of art history technologically critical artworks that for years have circulated within new media festivals rather than in galleries. While information science draws distinctions between “information,” signals, and data, artists from the 1960s to the present have questioned the validity and value of such boundaries. Artists have investigated information's materiality, in signs, records, and traces; its immateriality, in hidden codes, structures, and flows; its embodiment, in instructions, social interaction, and political agency; its overload, or uncontrollable excess, challenging utopian notions of networked society; its potential for misinformation and disinformation, subliminally altering our perceptions; and its post-digital unruliness, unsettling fixed notions of history and place. Artists surveyed include
David Askevold, Iain Baxter, Guy Bleus, Heath Bunting, CAMP (Shaina Anand & Ashok Sukumaran), Ami Clarke, Richard Cochrane, Rod Dickinson, Hans Haacke, Graham Harwood, Jenny Holzer, Joseph Kosuth, Christine Kozlov, Steve Lambert and the Yes Men, Oliver Laric, Les Levine, László Moholy-Nagy, Muntadas, Erhan Muratoglu, Raqs Media Collective, Erica Scourti, Stelarc, Thomson & Craighead, Angie Waller, Stephen Willats, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, Elizabeth Vander Zaag Writers include
James Bridle, Matthew Fuller, Francesca Gallo, Antony Hudek, Eduardo Kac, Friedrich Kittler, Arthur and Marielouise Kroker, Scott Lash, Alessandro Ludovico, Jean-François Lyotard, Charu Maithani, Suhail Malik, Armin Medosch, Srinivas Aditya Mopidevi, Craig Saper, Jorinde Seijdel, Tom Sherman, Felix Stalder, McKenzie Wark, Benjamin Weil
David Askevold, Iain Baxter, Guy Bleus, Heath Bunting, CAMP (Shaina Anand & Ashok Sukumaran), Ami Clarke, Richard Cochrane, Rod Dickinson, Hans Haacke, Graham Harwood, Jenny Holzer, Joseph Kosuth, Christine Kozlov, Steve Lambert and the Yes Men, Oliver Laric, Les Levine, László Moholy-Nagy, Muntadas, Erhan Muratoglu, Raqs Media Collective, Erica Scourti, Stelarc, Thomson & Craighead, Angie Waller, Stephen Willats, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, Elizabeth Vander Zaag Writers include
James Bridle, Matthew Fuller, Francesca Gallo, Antony Hudek, Eduardo Kac, Friedrich Kittler, Arthur and Marielouise Kroker, Scott Lash, Alessandro Ludovico, Jean-François Lyotard, Charu Maithani, Suhail Malik, Armin Medosch, Srinivas Aditya Mopidevi, Craig Saper, Jorinde Seijdel, Tom Sherman, Felix Stalder, McKenzie Wark, Benjamin Weil
- GenresArt
240 pages, Paperback
Published September 9, 2016
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
November 5, 2023
INFORMATION is an entry in MIT’s wildly addicting Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art series. It’s basically art journal articles collected around a certain topic. A certain rabbit hole-style of series not unlike Oxford’s Very Short Introductions series on general topics or an rediscovering authors through the NYRB Classics. As a librarian I found this particular topic fitting, spiraling off into new conceptualizations of information, stretching and beings and pushing the realm of information in the everyday. Whitechapels can be explored by going back and looking at the art, but the mental gymnastics opens us up to a richer view of everyday life.
We are all users of information, creators and providers and consumers all at once. Constant Dullaart warns us against this role, explaining why they quit information production:
“I stopped that I needed to add brand new content to the world a long time ago, I think we needed in framing this enormous amount of visual language that is developing and we are overloaded with [it] before we have figured out what it all entails… click scroll swipe click misepelllling lol wtf clikc tty” (23, sic).
The overload is no less than an “ocean of information” which goes deeper in Srinivas Aditya Mopidevi’s Solid Seas and Moving Constellations, 2016. There, it is posed that we are living in a fluid extension of modernity, taking off from Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s ‘liquid modernity’. We are at war with it— or other producers—
“not the one which conquers a new territory, but the one that crushes and dissolves the walls and boundaries that come in the way of newly dispersing liquid flows of capital and power. As Bauman observes, ‘for power to be free to flow, the world must be free of fences, barriers, fortified borders and checkpoints. Any dense and tight network of social bonds, and particular a territorially rooted tight network, is an obstacle to be cleared out of the way….”
Terrifying, and real. The focus of Mopidevi’s piece is a Raqs Media Collective video of massive cranes being dismantled in England and shipped to India, refers to these local bonds being ripped apart, but also simultaneously creating new identities elsewhere… “The work is both about driving away and coming ashore. The ‘knots’ of the title can refer both to nautical speed as well as to the complex ties that bind people to histories. Ties hold things together and speed frays hem apart. The knots that bind are the knots of the fray,” (133-134).
As more liquid flows of power seep through borders, it’s obvious that an increase of barriers will do more harm than good. Eduardo Kac’s Aspects of the Aesthetics of Telecommunications, references the artist as a creator of context, as opposed to “the linear model of communication, which privileges the artist as the codifier of messages…” thus “messages are not ‘works’ but part of a larger communicational contexts, and can be changed, altered and manipulated virtually by anybody” (30).
Kac wrote this in 1992. He checks in on the liquid modernity thing from Mopidevi, presupposing the idea by discussion cultural values, which “are also questioned, since the structures that privileged one culture over the others are conceptually challenged, brining cultural differences to the forefront.”
Whether or not this is good or bad, it seems the way forward. A piece from 1971 by Les Levine describes Information Fall-Out, information behavior as some kind of benign, monolithic mirror. The curator, Les writes, has gathered and made the information— it is technology that “has a greater effect on the cultural thrust than art… It has created many levels of things we thought art would. Probably the greatest reason why technology has taken over art is because art was always technology anyway. The art of the cave painter was a technological art. It was an art of how to do it, how to image the society, how to present society with a useful device for shaping that society. Now we are arriving back technologically to cave painting. We’re now ar a point where technology can present us with a model of our working selves,” (71).
Whether irs the erosion of a concept of art or the erosion of barriers and borders, the concept of the third space seems integral to any artistic endeavor. Museums being places where the art can exist, or things that don't seem like art can be declared or installed. How are library collections like art? A discussion from Antony Hudek in From Over- to Sub-Exposure looks back on Jean-Francious Lyotard’s Les Immatériaux held at the Centre Pompidou in 1985. Hudek explains that the exhibition would be the last to
“…to embody the latter's original ambition to be a centre open to all forms of expression, from industrial design and urbanism to painting and performance, instead of a modernist museum based on the neat differentiation between departments according to media. Les Immateriaux represented, as it were, a hinge in the Centre Pompidou’s history, between a more conventional culture….and a certain postmodern idealism that tolerated, even encouraged, the blurring of disciplines and exhibitions with an element of pathos and drama. As Chaput expressed it in 1985, ‘Les Immatériaux represented ‘one of the last “romantic” experiences,” (77).
Again, here we have a lack of boundaries being constricted and reorganized into a more segregated set of departments through artificial means.
In a straight presentation of the art, the entry on Thomson & Craighead’s Beacon from 2005 is a presentation of the piece. Theirs was an installation devoid of filtering boundaries. According to automatedbeacon.net, Beacon “first stated at 00.00 hours GMT on 1 January 2006. Live Web searches are continually relayed as they are being made around the world as endless concrete poetry. It has been instigated to act as a silent witness: a feedback loop providing a global snapshot of ourselves in real time…” And it ends up looking something like this:
Take the plunge sloganreer…
Nodules found in the lungs…
Famous people that are dead…
can i put peppers in bottles of vinegar…
What is status conferral…
Boundless, random concrete poetry may not exactly catch on, but we have here an example of unbounded interconnections of one type. Within the collection you’re able to see an expansive archive of arranged ideas side-by-side and garner the commonalities between them for yourself. This very presentation and preservation is commented on by Alessandro Ludovicio’s Consumer Without a Screen from 2011, wherein the worlds of digital and physical media are reconciled, but never really equal:
“If digital expands our possibilities and access to content, print is still the preferred medium for preservation. The ‘convergence’ of different media into a paradise ruled by some omnipotent digital god resounds once more like empty propaganda. The ruling classic interfaces operate alongside digitally specific platforms in a desperate attempt to establish a digital standard for print, as was accomplished for music and video. Once established, this standard will likely escalate out taste for and consumption of editorial products, which unpredictable social consequences. But print will not disappear. On the contrary, whether cheap last-minute up-to-the-date print-outs or more expensive limited editions, the printed medium is simply mutating as a physically enjoyable form and a future luxury: consume without a screen,” (162).
We are all users of information, creators and providers and consumers all at once. Constant Dullaart warns us against this role, explaining why they quit information production:
“I stopped that I needed to add brand new content to the world a long time ago, I think we needed in framing this enormous amount of visual language that is developing and we are overloaded with [it] before we have figured out what it all entails… click scroll swipe click misepelllling lol wtf clikc tty” (23, sic).
The overload is no less than an “ocean of information” which goes deeper in Srinivas Aditya Mopidevi’s Solid Seas and Moving Constellations, 2016. There, it is posed that we are living in a fluid extension of modernity, taking off from Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s ‘liquid modernity’. We are at war with it— or other producers—
“not the one which conquers a new territory, but the one that crushes and dissolves the walls and boundaries that come in the way of newly dispersing liquid flows of capital and power. As Bauman observes, ‘for power to be free to flow, the world must be free of fences, barriers, fortified borders and checkpoints. Any dense and tight network of social bonds, and particular a territorially rooted tight network, is an obstacle to be cleared out of the way….”
Terrifying, and real. The focus of Mopidevi’s piece is a Raqs Media Collective video of massive cranes being dismantled in England and shipped to India, refers to these local bonds being ripped apart, but also simultaneously creating new identities elsewhere… “The work is both about driving away and coming ashore. The ‘knots’ of the title can refer both to nautical speed as well as to the complex ties that bind people to histories. Ties hold things together and speed frays hem apart. The knots that bind are the knots of the fray,” (133-134).
As more liquid flows of power seep through borders, it’s obvious that an increase of barriers will do more harm than good. Eduardo Kac’s Aspects of the Aesthetics of Telecommunications, references the artist as a creator of context, as opposed to “the linear model of communication, which privileges the artist as the codifier of messages…” thus “messages are not ‘works’ but part of a larger communicational contexts, and can be changed, altered and manipulated virtually by anybody” (30).
Kac wrote this in 1992. He checks in on the liquid modernity thing from Mopidevi, presupposing the idea by discussion cultural values, which “are also questioned, since the structures that privileged one culture over the others are conceptually challenged, brining cultural differences to the forefront.”
Whether or not this is good or bad, it seems the way forward. A piece from 1971 by Les Levine describes Information Fall-Out, information behavior as some kind of benign, monolithic mirror. The curator, Les writes, has gathered and made the information— it is technology that “has a greater effect on the cultural thrust than art… It has created many levels of things we thought art would. Probably the greatest reason why technology has taken over art is because art was always technology anyway. The art of the cave painter was a technological art. It was an art of how to do it, how to image the society, how to present society with a useful device for shaping that society. Now we are arriving back technologically to cave painting. We’re now ar a point where technology can present us with a model of our working selves,” (71).
Whether irs the erosion of a concept of art or the erosion of barriers and borders, the concept of the third space seems integral to any artistic endeavor. Museums being places where the art can exist, or things that don't seem like art can be declared or installed. How are library collections like art? A discussion from Antony Hudek in From Over- to Sub-Exposure looks back on Jean-Francious Lyotard’s Les Immatériaux held at the Centre Pompidou in 1985. Hudek explains that the exhibition would be the last to
“…to embody the latter's original ambition to be a centre open to all forms of expression, from industrial design and urbanism to painting and performance, instead of a modernist museum based on the neat differentiation between departments according to media. Les Immateriaux represented, as it were, a hinge in the Centre Pompidou’s history, between a more conventional culture….and a certain postmodern idealism that tolerated, even encouraged, the blurring of disciplines and exhibitions with an element of pathos and drama. As Chaput expressed it in 1985, ‘Les Immatériaux represented ‘one of the last “romantic” experiences,” (77).
Again, here we have a lack of boundaries being constricted and reorganized into a more segregated set of departments through artificial means.
In a straight presentation of the art, the entry on Thomson & Craighead’s Beacon from 2005 is a presentation of the piece. Theirs was an installation devoid of filtering boundaries. According to automatedbeacon.net, Beacon “first stated at 00.00 hours GMT on 1 January 2006. Live Web searches are continually relayed as they are being made around the world as endless concrete poetry. It has been instigated to act as a silent witness: a feedback loop providing a global snapshot of ourselves in real time…” And it ends up looking something like this:
Take the plunge sloganreer…
Nodules found in the lungs…
Famous people that are dead…
can i put peppers in bottles of vinegar…
What is status conferral…
Boundless, random concrete poetry may not exactly catch on, but we have here an example of unbounded interconnections of one type. Within the collection you’re able to see an expansive archive of arranged ideas side-by-side and garner the commonalities between them for yourself. This very presentation and preservation is commented on by Alessandro Ludovicio’s Consumer Without a Screen from 2011, wherein the worlds of digital and physical media are reconciled, but never really equal:
“If digital expands our possibilities and access to content, print is still the preferred medium for preservation. The ‘convergence’ of different media into a paradise ruled by some omnipotent digital god resounds once more like empty propaganda. The ruling classic interfaces operate alongside digitally specific platforms in a desperate attempt to establish a digital standard for print, as was accomplished for music and video. Once established, this standard will likely escalate out taste for and consumption of editorial products, which unpredictable social consequences. But print will not disappear. On the contrary, whether cheap last-minute up-to-the-date print-outs or more expensive limited editions, the printed medium is simply mutating as a physically enjoyable form and a future luxury: consume without a screen,” (162).
November 27, 2017
While the title piqued my interest, this book isn't really anything special. Rather, it is a collection of short pieces on the topic of information itself. I expected there to be a large number of images but I was disappointed in that as well. Given all of that, this book is really nothing more than mediocre. It didn't leave a bad taste in my mouth, but it also didn't impress me.
November 18, 2018
The quality of the essays varies to much, overall the most obscure ones have documental value.
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February 1, 2020709.04 I436 2016
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews