Database Aesthetics: Of Containers, Chronofiles, Time Capsules, Xanadu, Alexandra and the World Brain, by Victoria Vesna
With the amount of information available on the Internet a concern is the organization and retrieval of data. Vesna claims that artists have a role to play in the design of systems of access, and likens this to building an atmosphere of 'information architects'.
A fascinating part of the article recalls Buckminster Fuller and his "Chronofile" collection of his life objects, data, possessions, papers, events, etc. I visited one of the sites about him:
"Guinea Pig B is a name Bucky gave himself, to signify that his life was an experiment.
Excerpted from "BuckyWorks: Buckminster Fuller's Ideas for Today" by James T. Baldwin:
His alternative to politics was radical and deeply subversive. If we are designed like other animals to be a success, then nature must have provided enough of everything needed for all to live a healthy existence. People living well would have little interest in fighting and destruction. Bucky decided that reliable information and efficient design could identify and fairly distribute the Earth's resources, bringing a good life to all. Developing that information and putting it to work would be the mission of Guinea Pig B."
-taken from Who is Buckminster Fuller? page @ BFI.org, with this citation in place;
Reused by permission of the publisher John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Imagine how forward thinking this is that Fuller began a chronological record of his life in 1907. He added into his personal life archive data of world events and became more ambitious with the introduction of computer technologies. In 1965 he is quoted as saying "...We will store all the basic data in the machine's [computer's] memory bank..."
Vesna's article also covers major archives such as The Great Library of Alexandria, the exhaustive image collection of (Microsoft/Bill Gates owned) Corbis Image Library and the work of Brewster Kahle's archive of every public Web page since 1996. His Alexa site is home to web page searches, check it out. If you take nothing more from this article than an exploration of Fuller and his Guinea Pig B experiment, you will have a good sense of information overload.
2 comments:
I found that I got much more than a sense of information overload from this article. In fact, the very idea that Bill Gates is now accumulating images, through Corbis, as the next big source of online interest and control worries me. The entire idea of Internet2 also, I hate to say it, scares me. Privatization of and controlled access to information is on the corporate agenda.
While there may indeed be overload, the fact that it's all there for you to use or ignore at will is rather exciting. The thought that the democratic and open information access we have enjoyed may be coming to an end, for the almighty dollar, is just nasty.
Hi Janis,
I thought I had read this article, but obviously not. I'll have to see how I missed it. All that I know of Bucky, is that I spent 4 months living in one of his domes, which uses the least amount of resource for the most amount of space. This was 25 years ago, it was solar and wind powered. Today I heard that Ontario is building another Nuclear Reactor. Not the subject of this blog I know. But maybe tangentially.
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