LEAD Chat Transcript: Wild Nature and Digital Life
with Kathryn Yusoff and Brett Stalbaum
Click here to download pdf version.
Also available in Portuguese.

View Kathryn Yusoff’s essay: “Mapping the Disaster: Global Prediction and the Medium of ‘Digital Earth” (LEA Vol 14 No 07 - 08 2006)

and Brett Stalbaum’s essay: “Paradigmatic Performance: Data Flow and Practice in the Wild”
(LEA Vol 14 No 07 - 08 2006)

The "Leonardo Electronic Almanac Discussion" (LEAD) accompanies selected LEA Special Issues. LEAD has two components a live chat session with LEA authors and artists and a moderated discussion list for readers to engage with the special issue authors.

The following is the unedited transcript from Wednesday’s (3 January 2007) chat session with Open University research fellow Dr. Kathryn Yusoff and San Diego-based artist Brett Stalbaum, discussing their respective works on visualizations of the earth, landscape and environments, as part of the online discussion around Wild Nature and Digital Life special issue of the Leonardo Electronic Almanac. <Marcus Bastos & Ryan Griffis>

<begin transcript>
Ryan Griffis: Thanks everyone for joining the conversation, especially our guests Brett Stalbaum and Dr. Kathryn Yusoff. Marcus Bastos and myself are the volunteer moderators for this series of discussions revolving around the Digital Wild issue of the Leonardo Electronic Almanac. We're looking forward to the discussion! Marcus Bastos: Brett, when I was reading your essay “Paradigmatic Performance: Data Flow and Practice in the Wild, toward the sublime (2K4-2K5)” (http://www.paintersflat.net/rlessay.html), it occured to me that Robert Smithson´s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Smithson) work has a lot to do with questioning the traditional concept of Landscape. Probably one of the lessons we can learn from Land Art is that Landscape may be broader than what is visible by the eye. But nowadays, there seem to be a return to the idea of landscape, or related concepts such as datascape. Do you think technology allowed us to reframe our idea of landscape, by making us perceive this broader picture that is not merely “visible”?

Brett Stalbaum: I have tended to read Smithson's aesthetics of landscape not so much in terms of technology but more so in a struggle for over the terms of representation and the "white cube". Of course technology has spawned, to some degree, yet another reevaluation of "landscape" - this was as true for Smithson (heavy
earth moving equipment, cars, airplanes...) but so too it was true for romantic painters. I think Smithson's deepest work and his really big issues come out more in the non-sites than his big earthworks.

Kathryn Yusoff: At the same time, Smithson's work is interesting for calling attention to the way that environments / landscapes emerge through technology. It is interesting to note that the term landscape refers etymologically to visuality, that is to space conceived as a framed scene. This sense of environment clearly emerges from visual technologies. To say that technologies determine environments is less interesting than to inquire into the ways in which technologies and environments co-evolve. Certainly Smithson's work operates in this way.

MB: Romantic painters were trying to capture a scenario that was perceptible by the human body and Smitgson go beyond that. You cannot really "see" the Spiral Jetty. In this sense I think he was, of course, questioning representation, but also re-presenting nature, re- framing it (or unframing it).

KY: I think Smithson was trying to prise apart the forms of collaboration that operate between matter and languages of representation. In this sense, landscapes "talk back," and the entropy of sites like Spiral Jetty force the question of how what we capture also dissolves in that capture.

RG: With Smithson, technology was also necessary for "seeing" (the plane for earthworks and geological knowledge to "read" a non-anthrocentric sense of time... A geographical, or spatial, turn has been discussed across a lot of disciplines lately... and the intersection with new forms of mediation definitely seems foregrounded as well... something that both Kathryn and Brett deal with in extremely interesting ways in their contributions to this issue.I also think Roger Malina's recent post to the list gets to Marcus' notion of "broader than the what is visible by the eye"...any comments on this? I know Kathryn already responded on list...

BS: Right, "landscape" is just one way of looking at a history of breaking the terms of representation. Breaking from the visual frame into the space of the white cube then problematizing the white cube. Now, problematizing post-visual (or extra-visual) representation of the Earth – with Geographic Information System, known as GIS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gis). I have read Kathryn's essay with much excitement. Data representation operates both as data visualization and data modeling... Hence, "extra-visual", and embedded in the operation of Earth systems in some way. Kathryn's essay enhanced my sense of the scope of this relationship.

KY: And then data also operates in real-time, as a source of feedback and control, maintaining the environments we inhabit. With meteorological sensors, we can see this happening.

RG: Brett - could you elaborate on the distinction between visualization and modeling?

MB: Isn´st it a matter of... perspective? (And this is not a mere play on words, since maybe one of the aspects here is how data visualization may model different understandings of the world, different ways of "seeing" things.)

RG: And Kathryn - what about the difference between "maintaining" and "creating" in terms of the "environments we inhabit"?

KY: Certainly maintaining and creating exist in relation, as de Certeau suggests, there is an architecture to environments and / or data; and then there is the way that we articulate those "topographies" through practice (hence, different modes of creation).

BS: It is information versus data. Visualizations are representations intended to convey information about data. Modeling refers to how data is collected and organized. Kathryn points out in her essay that this is a significant issue from the perspective of the earth sciences - because we are always tweaking the model.

RG: And I think it's also useful to consider the reality of different environments existing in the same space, depending on "who" is inhabiting them... as Kathryn's discussion of disaster makes important to me.
 
BS: And, it is not all about seeing anymore. That may be the change that is wrought by ubiquitous IT, such as GIS.

RG: good clarifications/points, Brett and Kathryn - thanks!

BS: This may be strange to artists - but non-visual representations have perhaps surpassed visual ones in terms of influence on "what happens".

MB: How? What are the examples of that?

BS: Federal Express, UPS, Walmart.

KY: This is true for climate change models, where so much data is not visual (but perhaps atmospheric), and so visualization is introduced as a tool for understanding the data--but this is a translation that happens after data capture.

BS: Material stuff is moving around based on data flow. It is not necessarily being visualized.

RG: this has also been discussed in terms of bioinformatics, that are changing the importance of representations of biology. The visual becomes a PR tool, for a public still optically stimulated  But on the other hand, i also recently attended a conference on Post-Katrina weather analysis and new visual models... there was a lot of emphasis placed on analyzing numerical data, but only once it had been put into representation form. In other words, they let a simulation depict the data, which they then used to predict probabilities. I'd have to look back into my notes to find the who/where/what of that discussion...

KY: I think Peter's work on the play in the machine is interesting to consider here, where the generation of simulated events might reinvent the possibilities for how we think of the translation from data to representation, or how we conceive of data capture in the first place. Is there such a thing as play within data?

Peter Hasdell: My own point of view here is that this is the unknown or where the digital wild occurs. I wonder if this connects to the notion of sublime? was intrigued by the discussion on the sublime, as that which is beyond our rational comprehension, I wonder how this might relate to data sets, meteorology or complex phenomena and
interactions. I have always had a perverse fascination with the idea of stock market 'sentiment' which seems to be an emotional condition attached to an indescribable condition

KY: Yes, the many versions of sublime, like Kant's mathematical sublime, with bewildering numbers.

BS: Katrina as it turned out was predicted quite accurately in a spatial sense - though not a temporal one. I don't know about play, but there is certainly a politics not only of data representation (Manovich puts this on at leat a part with representations of class, race, gender, etc) but there is also the political issue of what data, by and for whom, etc. All much discussed. The sublime is very interesting to me.

KY: I've often wondered if it is possible to talk about a sort of political ecology of the sublime.

RG: I think Peter's point connects back to Roger's list post, and the location of the "wild" or "natural" in the unknown (the unseeable "dark matter" in Roger's example). Hard to think of something more sublime than "dark matter" to me... perhaps why Gregory Sholette used it politically?

BS: I relate Kant's sublime (a function of quantity) with data, and his notion of beauty (a function of quality or form) with information.

RG: Unknown quality and/or quantity...

KY: But then the deployment of that unknowing: for play or for political manipulation or...

PH: In response to Kathryn's data set query another perhaps historically dated event in computing were early computers whose data sets were part of the instruction set and could therefore modify this, this was seen as too dangerous (wild?) and hence these were later separated.

BS: I may post a related question to Roger later... it is actually a question I raised in my essay. It is easy to think of performing with GIS data. It is at a more human scale. How we perform with biological data sets and astronomical data sets is to me an open question.

RG: Good point about scale - seems an important filter to consider.

KY: This raises questions about who is able to modify and access data.

BS: Certainly sublime data sets (quantifiable but very big data) is an issue in the earth sciences, biology, astronomy/astrophysics, and also surveillance.

KY: While climate change is primarily located in the earth sciences, the comprehension and forms of intervention proceed from a more political endorsement of these models.

RG: this leads me to 2 quotes, one from Brett, the other Kathryn that I find really interesting and challenging in similar ways, that maybe could be discussed...

BS: The issue of access to data is also one of the language of coding - GIS data sets, for example, are notoriously inscrutable. This and copyright are barriers to access.

RG: Kathryn: "we need to expand our maps to write at the limit of their possible configurations, and by trying to imagine ourselves in that impossible space, we might find the conditions of responsibility and response that the disaster requires of us. "

BS: "Rather, the totally embedded mediation of global material culture and economics by computation and communications indicates that artists should at a minimum pay attention to how the material effects of information technology are distributed via a holistic analysis." But i think they both get to notions of access, modification and manipulation of data, and pose a serious question.

RG: In some ways, I read these similar to Alan Sekula's asking for a reading of archives "from below"

KY: Could you clarify what you mean with Sekula's "from below?"

RG: He was discussing the history of photographic archives and their function as indexes of power... "from below" is similar to reading "against the grain" of history...

PH: Data linkages to the physical with the possibility of feedback (ie who can access and thereby change locally and globally) will define to a large degree the coming... paradigm of such conditions.

 MB: Regarding this question, I think it is worth observing how technologies such as mobile phones, gps and such, differently from the Internet, are more tied to corporate agendas.

BS: Drew Hemment has done some very interesting work on politics and the mobile hand set... Essentially, that such technologies' political moment will come from users offering themselves up for surveillance. Change from the inside, not without the system. Or against it... Kathryn's quote goes to (for me) the potential for the sublime: maps imply more exploration and more (different) kinds of maps being produced. IT can not contain a 1:1 copy, but new discovery in the form of data processing can imply new or other problems... new data to collect, potentially without any bounds. This is exciting and if artists take it up seriously, we might be able to be implicated in all of the fun that scientists are having instead of commenting on them.

RG: And possibly taking the fun in different directions?

KS: With the quote you choose, I was building on the work of Blanchot, who suggests that in conditons of disaster, it becomes necessary to think about how mapping changes in those impossible spaces of disaster. So in terms of Brett's comment, artists can certainly open up ways of thinking about "new data to collet."

RG: I found Kathryn's use of "limit of their possible configurations" interesting especially for how "limits" exist in many forms. In a sense, working at the limits is also creating a meta-map of those limits...

KY: Maybe this is related to the architectures we use to understand space, but also how that space trains its users. Blanchot suggests writing at the limit is a necessary utopian ethic. I think Brett's suggestion of taking seriously forms of embeddedness is an important part of this ethic.

RG: Good point... Brett, can you talk about this embeddedness?

BS: Kathryn, you raised the issue of aesthetics in your essay. As I recall, you situate observers of information as separate from those who suffer disaster. Right? Could you expand on the aesthetic issues surrounding GIS? That would be super interesting to me

KY: Here, I was thinking of the observers of the tsunami watching real-time models of dynamic earth processes as the water approached and swept over situated populations. There is a politics to the forms and degrees of isolation in the event as media, and as an embodied experience. And also in the reiteration of the event on media screens around the world.

BS: Embeddedness refers, (and I am making this up on the fly so for me at least), on how tools encapsulating knowledge are embedded in our distributed cognition as humans. Humans perform tasks and computation socially. That the most influential of these tools are now computers and networks (in that they mediate command and control of most systems), is important. People who have never made a phone call are mediated by such systems.

KY: But these are the very systems that also can break down or become inaccessible in disasters. This is where the conditions and possibility for response are reorganized (per Blanchot).

BS: There is for me, a passive aesthetic of looking. Vision is no longer active, but passive. This is another reason that data and digital computation as performance is more interesting to me today than visualization of data sets... Artists have been making things for people to look at for a long time.

MB: But don´t you think that the difference of mapping technologies, nowadays, is that they can be a space of collective agency, rather than an artist´s view of a group of information, or whatever?

RG: There seems an important question of power distribution regarding this distance in observation that Brett asks about, and I think, your answer points to Kathryn. Do either of you find changes that are specific to GIS tech either heightening or altering the dynamic there? Maybe related to Marcus' question...

BS: Certainly, the death of the author is an old story - George Landow related that to hypertext, early media art, all that. Certainly collective visualization or data collection is a kind of collective agency. Wikipedia.

Patrick Lichty: The space of disaster is something we have had to deal with a lot here in Louisiana.  There are two types of disaster/ space here; one, the one in the midst of crisis, and the other in the liminal state of irruption, in which the system is so far from normal operation that it is no longer "stable" nor "unstable". but then, what happens to social and informatic spaces in terms of spaces liek new orleans, or Phuket? Well, in New Orleans, there was an obvious crisis, or disruption during the events around Katrina. But then, over a year later, well after the "crisis" was over. Things are far from "stable" in Louisiana.

RG: Like "mission accomplished"  Could you elaborate on the notion of a system neither stable nor unstable?

KY: Although, it seems new forms of so-called stability are being engineered now through the control of the property market / urban landscape, among other things. It's disquieting.

BS: As to GIS, yes there are alterations in the dynamics of how people participate in space - movement which is an expression agency. Look at geocaching...

PL: There is asocial, political, economic state of chaos that still reigns here.  Or maybe more accurately, a fairly substantial state of change that is far from stable... a social... For example, ,the demographic makeup is still in a fairly dynamic state here.

RG: The geographer Ruth Gilmore uses the term (after Agamben and others) "organized abandonment" - i think related to Kathryn's point about new forms of stability...

PL: Large influx of Latinos, and unsure whether the African-American population will ever return, 250,000 people left the state. I like the idea of "organized abandonment", it seems to be an accurate term for the state here.

BS: Disquiteting to say the least. I remember that Las Vegas was ready to accept evacuee's very early, but FEMA told them that their services were not needed. Instead, many were sent to Houston Texas instead. Notably, Nevada is a state that is roughly divided politically, while Texas is a safe "red state" (supporters of the current administration...)

PL: Without getting "too" chatty (I promise to slow down in a minute), the 'death' strategy is also old as a Modernist trope.  That is, it's a fundamental Avant-gardist strategy to herald the 'death' of the old, only to bring in the birth of the new, or later, the "post-", which in itself is rather tired in itself.

MB: Not to say that the idea of "post"-something is paradoxical... how can something that is happening now be posthumous? McLuhan said we should not look to the future through a rear mirror and I think that terms link 'post-modern" are somehow doing just that. Isn´t it paradoxical to define what comes before "modernism", for example, by, instead of naming it, stating that it is posthumous to modernism?

RG: Interesting Brett, i didn't know about Nevada...

BS: I'm sure it is poorly documented. I heard about it in the days after the disaster... but have not since. The comment on the political dimension of why people were not sent to Nevada are mine, that has not been reported on to my knowledge.

RG: I imagine not!

PL: And of course, Houston _wanted_ the refugees.. My in-laws (who are from South Central Texas - Shiner, to be exact) have the refugees as a daily 'irruption' to the normative.

BS: My interest in that moment (the late 60's, early 70's) and all of the "deaths of" is inspired more more by return of performance (Happenings, so on) than the the death of painting or anything like that. Expansion of possibilities for practice...

PL: But in many ways, even with the salon des refusees on, the idea of the 'death' is fairly similar, even though it changes mode and genre.  It still represents the state of change, the transcendence from one state to the next. Presumably on the sense of progress, expansion, possibility. I prefer to think that all of these are econfigurations, rather than progressions.

BS: Although, perhaps not teleological... right. What Patrick said

PL: In many ways, post-modernism asserts accretion, rather than transcendence. The problem is that in the Postmodern, Modernism still exists!

RG: The link between the performative and the adoption of certain positivist methodologies (but reconfigured and problematized) is interesting to me... especially the adoption of scientific and bureaucratic devices within performance... like Brett's work with C5 (http://www.c5corp.com/) and of course others like Trevor Paglen (http://www.paglen.com/), The Center for Land Use Interpretation, CLUI (http://www.clui.org/), Multiplicity (http://www.multiplicity.it), etc... in many ways a continuation of people like the NE Thing Co (http://www.ccca.ca/artists/artist_info.html? languagePref=en&link_id=1843) and others from the 60/70s... but in many ways very different. NOT SURE IT THAT IS THE CORRECT URL MAYBE THERE´S A BETTER LINK?

PL: Or Rtmark (http://www.rtmark.com/)?

RG: Of course, RTmark!

PL: Not sure whether Yes Men qualifies, as they (in themselves) don't use the bureaucratic structure as a methodology in itself; they work more parasitically upon said structures as a springboard for their
interventions

BS: Our slogan in C5 - "Theory as product", actually is a very apt description of what we do, and I can see it reflected in Ryan's statement. We develop theory which informs both the technology and the performances we produce, which in turn inform new theory. C5 is in many ways a machine for making things move forward in a way that problematizes and creates new problems to theorize and solve.

MB: Maybe David Grassi´s work... it is a bit like Yes Men, only he makes a fake corporation.

RG: But perhaps one distinction would be that someone like C5 and Trevor Paglen and CLUI actually participate in specialized discourses (tourism, geography, etc) without irony and parody. They produce knowledge through those and alongside those discourses... as Brett suggested earlier, it's working "from the inside"... (or am I misquoting?)

PL: And Critical Art Ensemble (http://www.critical-art.net/), but what I find as being especially interesting is the use of the various "legitimate" bureaucratic structures, then used in a critical context.

BS: That is fair, save one thing. C5 is not ironic, or a fake corporation.

PL: RTMark was ironic, but it was also a very real corporation.

BS: Oh, I misread you, C5, CLUI, Trevor, all are non-ironic.

PL: I'd say that in that context, C5 and CLUI are some of the best of the genre (non-ironic).

RG: Totally.

BS: And RTmark, Yes Men, the best of the ironic and simultaneously very serious.

RG: Of course, where those lines between irony and not irony blur is a great place.

MB: Maybe the Institute for Applied Autonomy (http://www.appliedautonomy.com/) would be a blurry example?

PL: Absolutely.

RG: Perfect example! I think all of these people/projects mentioned get there in various ways. At least to a critical perspective that is not simple in definition.

PL: SubRosa as well, but I think where the issue here is where the interveners are using legal bureaucratic structures as critical tools The issue is that when you get into folks like IAA and others

RG: SubRosa too of course... and they adopt bureaucratic postures occasionally...

PL: You get into groups that are operating under 'implicit' rather than 'explicit' bureaucracies.  Drawing upon using the formal legal structures as critical tools as opposed to implied structures.

MB: That is because it would possibly be difficult to separate "form" and "content" on those matters. I mean, sometimes working "from the inside" may be a problem!

RG: Good point Patrick and Marcus...
<end transcript>

Author Biographies
Dr. Kathryn Yusoff is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Open University. Her research interests center on re-thinking visual culture in relation to extreme environments and technologies of vision (particularly in Antarctica, Iceland and other cold regions). She has recently completed her Ph.D, Arresting Visions: A Geographical Theory of Antarctic Light at Royal Holloway, University of London (2004). Currently, she is curating the Interdependence Day project, a research and communications project mapping the ethical terrain of globalization and environmental change.

Brett Stalbaum is an artist specializing in information theory, database, and software development. A serial collaborator, he was a co-founder of the Electronic Disturbance Theater in 1998, for which he co-developed software called FloodNet, which has been used on behalf of the Zapatista movement against the websites of the Presidents of Mexico and the United States, as well as the Pentagon. Recent work includes Painters Flat, projects with the painter Paula Poole in the Great Basin, and ongoing projects with C5 Corporation, of which he is a founding member. Stalbaum holds a Masters of Fine Arts (computers in fine art) from the CADRE digital media laboratory at San Jose State University, and a B.A. in Film Studies from San Francisco State University. He is a lecturer and the coordinator for the Interdisciplinary Computing and the Arts Major (ICAM) at the University of California, San Diego.

Citation reference for this Leonardo Electronic Almanac Discussion Chat Transcript

MLA Style
Stalbaum, Brett and Yusoff, Kathryn. “Brett Stalbaum and Kathryn Yusoff: LEAD - Wild Nature and Digital Life Chat Transcripts” “Unyazi” Special Issue, Leonardo Electronic Almanac Vol. 15, No. 1 - 2 (2007). 1 Jan. 2007 <http://leoalmanac.org/resources/lead/digiwild/bstalbaumkyusoff.asp>.

 APA Style
Stalbaum, B and Yusoff, K. (Jan. 2007) “Brett Stalbaum and Kathryn Yusoff: LEAD - Wild Nature and Digital Life Chat Transcripts,” “Unyazi” Special Issue, Leonardo Electronic Almanac Vol 15, No. 1 - 2 (2007). Retrieved 1 Jan. 2007 from <http://leoalmanac.org/resources/lead/digiwild/bstalbaumkyusoff.asp>.