Data-lobster: Double Articulation in the Symbiotosphere.

Dr Ann Finnegan

Data is the digital equivalent of clay: stuff, matter for mucking around in, for shaping and making, within, of course, the parameters of the 'material' of its generated consistency. Except that digital data as ethereal, abstract and therefore, 'non-material' in the strictest sense, also fits Derrida's description of writing as the 'being imprinted-of the imprint'1. Without a substrate data is less the imprint in a physical medium (the actual mark in stone or a computer screen) than the principle of being-imprinted. Paradoxically, how can such a system (and indeed what is writing or any kind of data) amount to a 'material' to be shaped, reworked, stretched and compressed without a physical limit? The capacity for "being-imprinted" is a variable, which can as easily accommodate the crunching of large numbers (to form 'data mass') or the mapping and configuration of any data through pure, abstract dimensionality (two or three), and at different saturations. Data can be compressed and expanded, within molar-molecular models; the inanimate animated (abstract numbers made to flow over time) and biotic flows still to static charts.

As such data mapping is an expression of the abstract machine and sits on a plane above 'mere' matter, in its function of being-imprintedness; however, the forms and shapes it assumes have a capacity for an independence only tangentially related to what was quantified or tallied in its collection. Data can swarm at the click of a calculus function and appear to take on a life of its own.

Thus even though data has to come from somewhere in that it has been sourced and collected, it's ultimately a product of an abstract machine, i.e., thought and cohered through a process of abstraction, and can assert a certain independence. Whereas, in the pre-computer era, data, though abstract, was physically cumbersome (requiring huge national archives) due to its dependence on the material form of its imprint. Now, the digital revolution has freed data from its material form and released it into its 'being-imprintedness'. Digital data can be mapped onto anything with potential for being-imprinted or inscripted, potentially the DNA of cockroaches2.

Given this 'independence', how data interfaces with life in the digital age re-introduces the question of the relationship between the one and the multiple; Deleuze's lone wolf of the several of the pack; one rat or a colony of rats3. Data may take on the overall molar shape of the one (the familiar bell-curve or the constellation of data-facts mapped through the third dimension of time), but it will always be made up of particles, of multiples. One's which make a crowd and exhibit behaviours.

Digi-Dada

The purpose of data is no longer inherently obvious, in that data is no longer tied to the reason for its collection, in a vector which links cause (desire for data) and its effect (its use). Data as accumulated electronically is more and more beginning to assume the consistency of data masses, which like matter manifest traits of similarity and difference. Sets of traits emerge. At turbulence.org4, the words of the works of two of the greatest writers of German literature and philosophy, Goethe and Wittgenstein, are mapped as clouds of data nebulae displaying the densities of inner collapse (when words like particles seem to fall together under the impact of gravity into mass) while outlier data of rare, lower-frequency words orbit at higher energy levels in outer shells. Ultimately absurdist in gesture, pure digi-Dada, these nebulae are just that - nebulous, fuzzy aggregates, agglomerations of word-frequency mapping passed through a calculus. In terms of yielding information there's nothing more useless that a word mass swirling in a data-cloud - as useless as Surrealism's fur teacups or an irons with nails. A lobster on a leash being taken for a walk.

As data-maps the works of Goethe and Wittengestein, ultimately, like Surrealism, manifest puns and contradictions: literally densities of text, words of heavy mass, the product of nebulous thought, etc.

In practical terms, to read this data, you'd need a translator interface to unswirl Goethe into a readable text; or a new kind of human-text interface, a cloud-reader. If only one could absorb content in the pure shape of a data map.

turbulence.org exhibits Goethe as purposeless purpose. Why do it? Because the data is out there, with an imperative to use it. On-line, there is masses of it mounting up as web pages of government documents, endless blogs, trade indexes, etc, waiting to be shaped, coloured, flavoured, sped up or slowed down, a new kind of universal matter or goop. When turbulence.org make Gutenberg galaxies out of the Gutenberg project (aiming to put the world's greatest books on-line) the books have effectively been taken out of the world (in another bad joke) and sent to a galaxy far, far away. With an absurdist independence. The French national archives would produce what kind of star? Black holes collapsing under inner mass? Data is set up to reflect its own inherent behaviours (mass, density) without having to reflect content.

Folds of Resistance

Data is out there in a seeming infinity of streams (the data-rain of The Matrix is, in Apollinaire's words, falling down the "perpendiculars of my existence") which paradoxically group in places which aren't really places (mere locals in a grid) but rather networks of postings. There's nothing there but displacement and condensation effects, ratios of speed and flow of the becoming imprinted, and the human task is to interface with this flow. Politics is the intersection of the one and the many. Enter the swarm, run with the pack; go schizophrenic, cut off into other flows.

Cut politics into data flows. Web artist, Rachel Baker5, works with the commercial data of supermarkets, specifically company loyalty club cards. Baker was concerned that more and more of our private data is being solicited by companies for purely economic gain: under the guise of 'what do you like?' 'What do you like to shop for?' 'How can we please you?' In attempting to anticipate consumer demand, shops survey their customer base and reward them with special deals through 'loyalty cards'. Baker began to collect them, and then to divert the customer base through an online survey of her own, replacing such questions as income bracket, etc with "are you clean or dirty?"

In doing so, she built up quite a popular 'club' through interactions with the customer base, and then emailed them to let them know that they were part of her project: data as reshaped life as art. She'd shaped, amused and also provoked a captive audience/client base through the 'club', but, at the same time, she was also encouraging her club members to reflect back onto the nature of data collection as it builds communities and redefines identities. In such a database a person is no longer described in terms of humanitarian or spiritual values, but purely in terms of shopping habits or capabilities. Kruger's "I shop, therefore I am" had put a consumerist inflection on Descartes' famous "I think, therefore I am", and Baker builds on Kruger's insight, effectively showing how the notion of what it is to be human is increasingly defined through commercial data interfaces.

Until recently, customer identity could not be personally identified. Market surveys were clumsy, expensive and dealt with poorly defined chunks of data lacking detail, and fine cross-referencing potential. Now commercial databases give meaningful shape to shopper/customer desire. Data becomes individually specific and begins to define the person. We are who we are through the way that we shop. Data has created another identity, another persona.

Baker's nonsensical interactions with her club members played at creating alternative identities within the club database. She broke no laws and was eventually contacted by the supermarket lawyers and asked to stop; she did, and then began a new club using the club and loyalty card of a rival supermarket chain. After another legal letter, that, too, stopped. But the work she did in creating identities, through data, is the work of an artist. The representation of subjects is not restricted to photography or paint. Subjectivities can also be created through data mapping and don't have to assume a mimetic form.

Baker's project shows that data doesn't have to copy anything; doesn't have to work through tropes of resemblance in order to engage with issues of subjectivity and identity; the ontic status of data as dependent variable frees it to assume its own form (traditional arts like portrait painting were dependent on the variable of the sitter within a regime of copying). Baker realized the potential of supermarket databases for creating a new kind of addressable individual, the individual consumer, as opposed to consumers 'en masse'. Targetable, as identified, a degree of privacy is lost: rogue consumer didn't conform, didn't purchase. Micro psychologies have to be built into customer profiling to counter the free radical of desire. Do you always know what you want? Consumers, as mobilized, swarm and act up?

In this scenario, data itself becomes a variable constructing the human sphere. Data reaches a kind of critical mass; the factors or where and what it counts, and cross-counts, has to be taken into account. Data is no mere accumulated counting, because the reach of its influence is effectively more than human, in other words, post-human. Computers have far exceeded our ability to count, to do certain kinds of calculations. Data has accumulated so much mass that it can now be mined as a vast unknown by computers equipped to do so (this is because accumulated computer data, like that of the human mind, can never adequately gather up and reflect back on the totality of itself: the paradox of 'find' and 'match' in Google -whacking is that finding any of anything unique is also the destruction of this very uniqueness because the very finding doubles it). Data, therefore, doesn't know what it, itself, knows, but once it reaches critical mass it can be mined for all sorts of new knowledge's, subsets and constructs. Baker could be said to mine supermarket databases for signs of consumer resistance, in a kind of double articulation of the data folded back on itself.

The Symbiotic (symbol + biosphere = lobster, a double articulation)

No mere human would ever be up to some tasks - in many cases of years, of a lifetime of work - in this age of post-human calculation. James Angus6, for example, takes as a template the uniform facade of Rome's famous Modernist icon, the Palazzo Civilia, and runs the data through a computer to generate a multiple-fractal organic form twisted into a three-dimensional Mobius strip. The computer performs the super-calculus of plotting which is then laser-cut according to the computer map. The result, a delirious nature-architecture hybrid, is the post-human product of data mapping, designed by a human, but executed post-humanly (except for the final stages of hand-gluing). There is a symbiosis of the biotic and the abstract plane of code.

God is a lobster. So proclaimed Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, on schizophrenia and capitalism. Professor Challenger, their mouthpiece, had just described God in the double pincer movement of a giant lobster. The key was double articulation, the doubling back of the fold. Strata "operate by coding" and come in pairs. Abstract machine over material substrate. Challenger "used the term matter for the plane of consistency... and content for formed matters." (43) But, having made this distinction, they went on to say, "the industrial age defined as the age of insects... It's even worse nowadays: you can't even tell in advance which stratum is going to communicate with which other, or in what direction... an electron crashes into language...the wasp and the orchid cross a letter...The plane of consistency is the abolition of all metaphor; all that consists is Real. These are electrons in person, veritable black holes, actual organites... the strata set up everywhere double articulations." (71-72) Folds and refolds.

The age of the insect, the swarm, of the one and the multiple, claims data mapping. The digital age is an insect age in which the word is the potential code in an insect's body rapidly reproducing. A precursor to this relationship was initially charted by the writer, Burroughs, in the image of the becoming-reptile, becoming-insect, of his typewriter. Now culture-jammers upload resistance of the human life form en masse. Recall the swarm of e-toy supporters who clogged the shopping bays and brought down the online toyshop that tried to bully e-toy into giving up its domain name, in Ian Walker's The Hacktivists. In the data-sphere, a swarm, a nebula, a condensation or constellation, can appear anywhere.

Biotic and code crash together - there is no longer the clear distinction of the strata. Repeat, and double, maybe refold: "You can't tell in advance which stratum is going to communicate with which other."

Notes.

1.	Derrida, J. Of Grammatology Trans. G. Spivak. (Baltimore: John Hopkins University, 1976) 63.
2.	Philippe Quéau borrows this idea from Jaron Larier's response to a New York Times Magazine brief to create a time capsule which would allow their archives to survive a thousand years in Manhattan: cockroach DNA has already survived for millennia and will survive a nuclear attack. However, Quéau's emphasis is on the fact that DNA is an encoding system, theoretically receptive to being imprinted with new data (digital data is 0-1, DNA is a four-base system). Queau suggests loading the entire Web into the genome of the insects and rodents of the planet, offering a new impetus for the reading of Nature. "The Whale, the Cockroach and the Rabbit." In Unplugged Art as the Scene of Global Conflict Ars Electronica 2002. (Linz: Hatze Cantz, 2002)
3.	Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Felix. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993)
4.	http://turbulence.org/works/nums
5.	Rachel Baker presented her work at Tilt: Trading Independent Lateral Tactics, a conference organised by dLux media arts, 8-20 Sept, 2001, in Sydney, Australia (curator Leah Grycewitz)
6.	James Angus, Palazzo delle Civilà Italiana. Exhibited at Roslyn Oxley 9, Sydney, October 2002.