Data Loam. A mixture of information, gravity and mess.
(a mess is a mess)
a new knowledge
»Data Loam« was designed as a multi-faceted arts-based approach to one of the more intractable and urgent problems facing our contemporary digital environment today: the massive proliferation of data, and with it, a particularly nuanced set of complexities confronting our national libraries, universities, research labs as well non-academic cultural institutions and industry-oriented environments. The urgency of the problem circled around three areas: archiving (what to archive and how), accessibility (how to ensure that knowledges systems would remain, intrinsically, ‘open’ in the face of ever-increasing data) and experimental (enabling creativity, intelligence, curiosity, diversity and risk to remain as fundamental to our way of life). In so doing, »Data Loam« rejected the entrenched paradigm of indexicality as the only method capable of articulating the ‘how’, ‘what’, ‘where’ and ‘when’ of the internet. This meant rejecting also the entrenched Cold War binaric systematizing that tended to promote apocalyptic narratives of technology pitting ‘man’ against ‘machine’, and in so doing, taking as given the end of freedom, rule of law, governance and indeed humanity itself.
Instead, »Data Loam« took as its starting point precisely the unruly materiality of information, with its the massive proliferation, messy logics, oddly cathected derivatives of circulation and exchange, navigational gaming, multi-dimensional visualities, crypto-economies, block-chain equivalences, and complexly sutured arenas of cultural difference. Rather than trying to compartmentalise, frame, cut-down, or force into silos or pockets of information, »Data Loam« foreground this exponential explosion of Big Data. It did so, first and foremost, by putting art-based research andpractice at its core, emphasizing the logics of sense, planes of immanence, feedback loops, multi-dimensionality, entanglement, and diffraction.
»Data Loam« was able to reach its main goal: the articulation of how data becomes self-organized and can produce a kind of open self-governance that relies of the mass proliferation of information. On a practical level, this included developing an algorithm that could enable a new lexicographical search and tag organising system. Perhaps most significantly, »Data Loam« answered the question of ‘how’ correlations ‘matter’; that is to say, how correlations generate matter, and in so doing enable heterogeneous and local dimensionalities that ‘in-form’ aesthetic-ethical-political ecosystems.
important results
All research entails some form of change from its outset to its delivery. For the »Data Loam« project this emerged from a sustained exchange of communications between and amongst our partners, where implementing an arts-based ‘unknowing’ or ‘curiosity’ began to take us in directions which we had identified, but only as the project progressed, did we realise how extremely important it was, and would become. This could be briefly described as ‘method’ for 21st century arts-science based research. Initially we focused on various methods, drawn from different disciplines (library sciences, physics, cybernetics, contemporary philosophy, political theory, feminism, contemporary art practice, queer theory and critical race studies), with the view that we would be suturing these various methods to develop the project. However, we soon came to realise that this approach fell into the same trap we had criticized at the outset: the silo/compartmentalising of knowledge. What »Data Loam« came to articulate during the project was the beginning of a truly inter/intra-disciplinary methodology, one that enabled a systematic approach without sacrificing the radical, boundless nature of information. We developed the concept of ‘mesh’ to begin to articulate the various ‘sticky cohesions’, movements, shifts of information. This multi-dimensional ‘mesh’ could not be reduced into disciplines or faculties as had been done via 17th-20th century liberal arts and science frameworks. Instead, what we found is that ‘mesh’ could provide (and did provide) the platform for which we were able to reach our goal(s).
Aims achieved
We were able to meet and exceed our stated aims. »Data Loam« focused on the problem of exponentially proliferating data in order to tackle questions of data ownership, data politics, speculative design of future data archaeology and novel approaches to so-called ‘post-factual’ data. At one level, our aim was to provide a different approach to the archive, open access, and experiment, and to do so by inviting partners from various scholarly and non-academic environments to share their concerns, thoughts and curiosities. To that end, we were able to articulate a wholly different approach to method, one that is profoundly inter-disciplinary and requires art-based research at its foundation. At another level, we strove to develop a new approach to the currently stymied encyclopedic rendering of information – typical of archival environments found in national libraries and, more recently, via, for example, Wikipedia. We developed a lexicographical prototype that is both algorithmic and scalable. It was show-cased in our final exhibition, »Data Loam: Sometimes Hard, Usually Soft«, (Angewandte Innovation Laboratory, 25 Feb-8 Mar 2019).
Contribution to arts-based research
»Data Loam« has contributed to the advancement of arts-based research at both methodological and pedagogical levels. It has been able to produce a methodological approach that no longer silos knowledge but requires a radical proliferation of data whilst simultaneously emphasizing cohesions and intensities rather than zero-sum binaric divides. It has done this, in part, by embedding our project in two different but highly regard contemporary arts practice postgraduate programs; namely: the PHD programme at the Royal College of Art (London) and the MA programme at The University of Applied Arts (Vienna). It was also rolled out at various conferences throughout Europe and North America with extremely positive reception Importantly, also, »Data Loam« has had impact on non-academic environments, where we have rolled out various aspects of the project (via performances, exhibitions, gaming conferences, design symposia) often connecting those who have been in some way disenfranchised from an academic environment.
Advancement to arts-based research
»Data Loam« has also increased the central role of arts-based research for the humanities and sciences at both the methodological as well as practical level. This has been specifically advanced by foregrounding contemporary art practice within emergent knowledge systems, demonstrating both ‘how’ and ‘why’ art-based research, with its generative heterogenic and sensuous expression, ‘makes’ (that is, produces, establishes, proliferates) logics of sense. »Data Loam« has proven shown that the way in which art-based research is incorporated into the very fabric of technological advancement, that the apocalyptic narratives of technological change become redundant, obsolete. Foregrounding contemporary art within and as expressed by emergent knowledge systems, new forms of circulation, distribution and exchange, »Data Loam« has provided a new method (the Mesh) for the mining, structuring and organising of wildly multiplying data. This elegantly simple and accessible move has already shown an impact at the University level, where there has been a strong and significant number of new PHDs taking up this emergent methodology regarding the radicality of matter and its coincident requirements for proliferation, multiplicity, and groundless logics of cohesion. At the RCA, for example, there have been six fully funded AHRC and EU funded PHDs working directly on this emergent method and the new materialities associated with it. In the course of the two year PEEK award, the PHD Entanglement Research group has grown from 9 students to 21. One PHD research award has been developed in cooperation with Google Artificial Intelligence Research Lab (from 2018).
Relevance of hypotheses and research questions
The »Data Loam« project addressed the need to articulate the profound generation and acceleration of information and its regimes of circulation, distribution, and preservation beyond the modern paradigm of indexicality. It took on the challenges created by the paradigm shift brought on new media, the technosphere, and profound advances in the sciences, but did so by place art-based research and practice at the core of the study. This enabled a refocussing, away from Cold War cybernetics and binaric zero-sum methods. In so doing, »Data Loam« has opened up and contributed to promising new research agendas, particularly in the field of new materialities and the method around which one can develop rigorous analytic tools without bringing to bear instrumental reason. We name this new field ‘radical matter’ and its method for engaging with it, the Mesh. It is an emergent field that takes as positive the development of distributed and artificial intelligence, crypto-economies and does so, in part, to rethink the archive (especially regarding national libraries) , experimental preservation (especially targeting museums and other cultural institutions), and governance (especially focussing on humanity, machines, as an ecosystem of democracy and the rule of law).
Development of new arts-based research methods
»Data Loam« has begun to articulate a new research method – one that has been developed in order to frame different fields of knowledge in a holistic way. This we understand as a compound of all the methodologies to generate a specific kind of knowledge as well as the topography in which it expresses its holdings. We have named it »Mesh«. In this usage is not meant as a metaphor, but as kind of materiality or even corporeality. In the way we see it, it is finite and yet open, fractal but without self-similarity. Although meshes often share similar properties and may as well overlap, some of them are closer related than others. The mesh of Medieval Scholastic for example might have little concord with Aeronautics, but still be entangled with Poetics. As part of the »Data Loam« project we took this approach as far as to develop an algorithm to organize a collection of data in a way that its inherent mesh structures would express themselves. This method draws together patterns in order to begin to articulate dimensionality and, therewith, matter. It points to a new paradigm, one that we are naming »radical matter«. The method requires the fore-fronting of experiment, making, critical reflexivity and the logics of sense.
Relevance for related or other areas of research
»Data Loam« has connected several areas of research, with specific emphasis on transdisciplinary issues and methods. This has included, in the main linking library and information sciences with computing engineering, contemporary art practice, philosophy, economics and governance. It has included exchanges with socio-political theories, feminism and queer studies. Certain principles from the sciences (specifically from quantum mechanics and meta-mathematics) have been incredibly important (for example, the undecidability/incompleteness principle theorem of Gödel). It also included forays into important contributions in feminist theory (Sedgwick), critical race studies (Suterwalla), queer theory (Muñoz) and trans-materialities (Barad, Stengers).