“In any net content, but most explicit and visible in commercial content, there’s a strict division between the data and the representation, the business logic and the representational logic.
Data that are processed on a commercial website are methodically mapped to instances of representation. Cut up the data into managed objects, make them relate to nicely sliced up objects of representation.
That’s perhaps why i get so eaily bored by any Net art project involving data mapping (no offense intended): us commercial guys do it all the time. Now you can mess up the data all you want, and mess up the objects of representation in any organically looking way you want, you’re still going to be left with data objects mapping through programmed algorhytms to objects of representation.
Sure you can hide the mapping process, play on the human senses, take the viewer’s focus away from the mapping process and make her believe the machine is actually doing something like singing a song, composing an original image or even writing a genuine line of pure poetry. Again, we from the commercial planet, have learned our lesson well: a web app hiding it’s database, pretending to be the helpfull store manager (with some of the company’s #DAEEFE color dilligently placed as a characteristic twinkle in her eye) will sell more products. So we tend to engineer towards more diversity, more complex mapping including AI generic algorythms.
And so it seems business information architects and a lot of net artists alike are chasing the same rabbit, trying to convince the audience the machine is a respectful, artisticly inclined citizen, addressing not the wallet, but the human social appetite for beauty.”
…I’m (re)writing the introduction to Cathedral Building Theory atm. It’s gonna take some time, i want to make it rather solid this time. During which i’ll post a paragraph or two here now and then…
