Cory Arcangel, Julian Bleecker, Natalie Bookchin, Kayle Brandon, Heath
Bunting, Alan Currall, Beatriz da Costa, Hans Haacke, Harwood/Mongrel, Agnes
Hegedus, Axel Heide, Pablo Helguera, Lisa Jevbratt/C5, George Legrady, Lev
Manovich, Jennifer + Kevin McCoy, Muntadas, onesandzeros, Scott Paterson,
Philip Pocock, Edward Poitras, David Rokeby, Warren Sack, Jamie Schulte,
Thomson&Craighead, Brooke Singer, Gregor Stehle, University of Openess,
Angie Waller, Cheryl L'Hirondelle Waynohtew, Marina Zurkow
Database Imaginary
Curated by Sarah Cook, Steve Dietz, Anthony Kiendl
"If [with] the arrival of the Web the world appears to us as an endless and
unstructured collection of images, texts, and other data records, it is only
appropriate that we will be moved to model it as a database. But it is also
appropriate that we would want to develop poetics, aesthetics and ethics of
this database."
Lev Manovich (1)
Database Imaginary presents 23 works made by 33 artists between 1971 and 2004. The art projects in this exhibition span a period almost as long as the word database has been in use. It is really only with the rise of
computing and widespread access to vast quantities of organized information
that the term has come to the fore in the popular imagination. The urge to
organize, however, is a longstanding trait of human civilization. In this
sense, Database Imaginary is less about databases than about this cultural moment when they have become ever-present.
Databases structure our economy, our knowledge systems, our security. Yet
these structures serve and are subject to multiple goals and agendas. Our
practical experience of databases in westernized societies suggest access
not just to information about the world, but the world痴 access to
information about us. We are the objects of databases: a phone number to
market to, a credit risk, a questionable border-crosser.
As artist and theorist Lev Manovich suggests, for such an ubiquitous cultural form � just as was the case with the automobile, skyscrapers, even
perspective � we need to imagine the possibilities of databases; to actively
shape them and participate in how they are used to organize the world we
live in. The artists and artworks in Database Imaginary warn, astound, and challenge us to understand database culture as a pervasive aspect of our contemporary environment and our lived experience. Databases present us with
a series of choices. Artist Edward Poitras suggests such choices involve negotiating missing information, misinformation and new information. It is up to us to choose whether or not and how to engage.
All the artists in Database Imaginary engage imaginatively with the organization of data through their use of aesthetic, conceptual, social and
political strategies. As artists Jon Thomson & Alison Craighead say, 釘y placing the viewer centrally, she joins the pieces together that are often un-related...Our interest is in visualizing things about our experience of such a huge networked space like the web. It痴 about bringing some sense of
order to a tumbling database for a moment and then seeing it fall back to
disarray.�
(i) Lev Manovich (1998) "Database As a Symbolic Form"
www.manovich.net/DOCS/database.rtf
This exhibition was co-organized by the Dunlop Art Gallery, Regina Public
Library, and made possible with funding from The Canada Council for the
Arts, the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science and Technology,
Canadian Heritage (Museums Assistance Program), and the Alberta Foundation
for the Arts.
