Professional Documents
Culture Documents
by philip pocock
on the occasion of the exhibition 'database
imaginary', Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff,
Canada
13.11.2004 28-01-2005
On off, up down, in out, here there, then now,
zero one - phenomenological pairs in general
digital space at root level. New media digitally negotiated environments multiply
these binaries to read write, close open.
Phenomena become issues that distinguish
inter-reactive new media CD and DVD
Rom, motion and image sensory
environments from translocal interactive,
database-driven consumer-generated
platforms such as unmovie.net.
Inter-reactivity, archival new media, CD and
DVD ROM (ROM, an acronym for ReadOnly-Memory, akin to G.Bush Sr. 'Read-MyLips' quip) obviously divest new media of
interactivity, Read dont write, burned,
closed not open. At best, responsive;
reducing humans to humanoid, sensing
bodies as light switches without qualities, in
outside world.
To take both allegories a step further; two
virtual caves or caches, lodged in digital data
space would have Platos cave dweller as
user, spectating and reading in a closed data
space, able to react but not interact in a
meaningful manner. Ali Baba, with open
access to and exchange between storage and
sources, is a performer, a participant in digital
data space. The Plato platform, the base for
new media Modernism, captures its users
desire for transcendence, which passivity
hopes for, with perceptions resembling data
on the surface, and doubtfully so. When the
user transcends, new media Modernism wins
the day, but only the day. In a new media
Modernist scenario, data displaying only their
surfaces are more precisely termed datoids, to
update in an age of digitally networked
environments, Norman Mailers 1973
neologism factoids: "facts which have no
existence before appearing in a magazine or a
newspaper, creations which are not so much
lies as products to manipulate emotions in the
Silent Majority."
Datoids settle in digital media that are
primarily read-only. Datoids are mapped onto