The work of artists in a databased society: Net.Art as online activism - Features - Internet standards and a Free Society - Excerpt

Afterimage, March, 2002 by Richard Miranda Zuniga

Of course, data analysis and exchange extends far beyond commercialism. Have you recently become a client of a multi-state system for electronic financial transactions that are operated by transportation authorities to shorten and economize your commute? Be aware, your information is shared with your auto insurance company, and you are being tracked. Are you a responsible citizen who has registered to vote? Those pesky data providers make use of your voter registration for profit. In fact, if you have filled out a form online or a questionnaire on the street that does not state that your privacy will be respected, and that "this information will not be shared," you have given away perfectly good personal merchandise. The data-self may also have much more direct consequence for an individual. In The Electronic Disturbance, (9) the Critical Art Ensemble poses the scenario of a person attempting to acquire a bank loan. She or he enacts all the appropriate social conventions as a loan applicant to give the impres sion of economic security, sporting proper attire and enacting formal etiquette. However, the "loan officer" is primarily concerned with the individuals credit history: "P's electronic double reveals that s/he has been late on credit payments in the past and that s/he has been in a credit dispute with another bank. The loan is denied; end of performance." [paragraph]

* TO INFORM: REVEALING THE DATA SELF

It is this data-based identity, this data-self that artist Brooke Singer constructs as her continually evolving self-portrait. The evolution of net.art has over the last number of years largely consisted of a movement away from narrative, in the traditional sense of using the Internet to communicate and exchange real experiences or fictions based in reality, toward constructions based in and on data that are working in the conjunction of the new bit-based reality and what we may have presumed to be simply real. In other words, the move is toward visualizing and mapping the Internet and its interactions with the discourses and spaces that constitute social, everyday life. Brooke Singer's "Self-Portrait (v2.o)" or "SPV2," (10) a project launched in October 2001, is part of this evolution in net.art. [paragraph]

Derived from the tradition of Western painting, the portrait was once used solely by the aristocracy to display an individual's wealth and power. In the mid-nineteenth century, the photograph expanded the possibilities of portraiture to the petit-bourgeois. In "SPV2" Brooke Singer updates the portrait to the information age. In an age when our data-selves may carry more significance than our real, blood-pumping and breathing selves, Singer has thoroughly investigated various databases accessible on the Web to create an online application cum portrait out of her very own data. [paragraph]

"SPV2" offers the user a selection of various data related to the artist that will load into the browser as a visual collage. Along the top of the pop-up window that presents the project, one is offered a row of categories: DataMine, DataWake, Join Me! and ReadMe. DataMine and DataWake are drop-down menus that list various data packets that will be visualized within the window. Under DataMine you have a selection of data that Singer either generates as part of her everyday life or is merely part of her environment: Incoming Email, Webcam and Weather. Within DataWake you have a selection of data collected around her person by external entities: Web Search, Clickstream, Consumer Profile, Voter Registration Information and Singer's FBI file. As the user makes data selections, the generating self-portrait function grabs data from the chosen source, deposits the data into a visual representation and displays it to the user. One may layer the various visual depictions to eventually achieve an aesthetic blend of dat a chaos. [paragraph]