CHArt TWENTY-FOURTH ANNUAL CONFERENCE
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Seeing…Vision and Perception in a Digital Culture |
Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss, Fraunhofer Institute IAIS, MARS - Media Arts and Research Studies, Germany
Performing the Archive for the Visibility of Information in Space
How to present knowledge as a visible shape? How to visualise it as a space to enter? Looking from a perspective of media art, this artists’ presentation examines the notion of knowledge space. The staging of information structures and the procedure of interactive perception will be exemplified by the authors’ own works.
The difficulty of orientation in online archives is due to contents only being viewable on hundreds of individual web sites. Two installations show how digital information can be spatially staged as publicly accessible archive. ‘Matrix’ and ‘Media Flow’, offer a complete overview of the online archive, which allows a dynamic switch of criterion, from detailed overview, down to the individual artwork. Both applications can reach back to data, which is saved in the online archive. They are exported via an XML gateway and presented audio-visually as an installation in physical space.
Interfaces were sought out, which make clicking around on websites dispensable. It is always the same problem with online archives: how can great masses of information be structured, so that everyone can easily find what they are looking for? What can one offer an audience that enjoys playing with the modern media, and in the process wants to gain experience and to learn something? It is Deep Storages’ storytelling.Inspired by art historian Aby Warburg and his notion of the Denkraum, we do research on the Virtual Denkraum and the aesthetics of staging knowledge space to enter - between experience and expertise. By knowledge space we understand architectural space furnished with data . Thus physical space transforms into a data landscape to walk in - an interactive environment connecting data, space and user. The visitor of such an environment is not only the protagonist, but also the producer of knowledge through interaction. For the human it becomes an enlarged action space that is experienced fourfold: by perception of the spatial (and other attendees), by exploration of data, by production of knowledge through active experience, finally, by the communication with others. In this presentation we introduce media art examples of staging knowledge in real and virtual space, driven by different paradigms of interactivity – and as public space of knowledge.