CASE STUDY
Context
1. Brief outline of the artist’s practice:
In the mid-1990s we (Corby and Baily) began to develop a series of projects that attempted to visualize social and behavioral relations on the Web. Cyclone.soc follows from this work in that is an immersive interactive environment that combines Internet debates between extremist religious and political groups with severe weather conditions. Streamed live, newsgroup postings are fitted to the atmospheric topologies of visualizations of cyclonic weather fronts to give the effect of the conversational churn and eddy of newsgroup argument and counter-argument. In resituating newsgroup postings as weather precipitation, the project frees pictorial elements to act as metonyms for different types of cultural and ideological tension enabled and produced through technological domains and develops a suggestive link between these extreme belief systems and their potential wider material and environmental impacts. Postings can then be read by either walking round the space or using controls to manoeuvre to specific formations and conversations.
At what point in the development of the work is the size of the image fixed?
When it is exhibited. The work is projected, sometimes into specially constructed spaces. The work bleeds into and other the surface of the work it is exhibited in.
At what point is the actual surface considered?
There are two answers to this question.
i) As the work exists in a digital format, any “material properties” that the surface of the work takes up come from the walls on which it is projected onto. So consideration in this sense occurs as post-hoc site-specific decision.
ii) As a digital “surface” texture, pattern and composition are generated as emergent properties of the system.. Consideration in terms of “composing” or “authoring” this process occurs at arms length, as the artists set in place a system rather than specify fixed outcomes. Thus the system generates the surface is designed during the authoring process (which can mean, during coding, initial discussions of work, drawing and other developmental processes).
What factors determine the choice or creation of the surface in this new work?
In our work we have always tried to draw attention to the material and social properties of digital data and strive to foreground this as part of the sensory experience of the projects we make. In addition we have published a series of “manifesto positions” that act as guides (not always strictly adhered to) for our practice two of which relate specifically the surface qualities of Cyclone.soc:
Networks induce hybrid practice
Networks pervade and cut across disciplines. This layered horizontal aspect allows us to relate and mix differing intellectual and aesthetic domains with relative ease and in doing so develop hybrid artifacts.
Software is organic matter
Software and networks are organic matter that should be seen as part of a
continuum with the material world and not separate from it
So to summarise, this particular project’s surface can be seen to have emerged in response to these positions and also the specific digital qualities of computer media that allow and disallow certain possibilities.
How does working digitally contrast with other practises they have used?
It contrasts in that it explicitly refers to external processes (meteorological and climate) whereas in previous work these types of connections were implicit in the work.
Information on new piece of work
Title of finished artwork
Cyclone.soc
Size in cms of finished artwork
Variable in size and duration
Process
Moving image, animation, network and meteorological processes.
Material
Computer code, Internet data, networked processes.
See also
Corby T. Networked Art Practices and Positions, Routledge: London, 2005.
Corby T. “Landscapes of Feeling, Arenas of Action”, Leonardo, Volume 41, Issue 5 (October 2008).
