Features

Here is a press release from an interesting exhibit that just closed in New York, NY. Remember that the text from the press release is written by artists, not researchers. Editor

July 6 --August 5, 2006

Artists:
Conrad Bakker
Jay Chung
Dora Garcia
Chris Moukarbel
Karen Reimer
Gerhard Richter
[The voice of] Robert Smithson
Donelle Woolford

Before the advent of computers, web crawlers, and double miles for grocery and gasoline purchases, data mining was either an in-house file-card system or a sordid early morning affair, limited to one company keeping track of its customers or tabloid detectives combing through garbage cans. In the digital era, with its vast and integrated information networks, data mining has flourished as marketing tool, as social science, and as surveillance, tracking everything from our eating habits and entertainment preferences to our phone logs and medical histories. As such, data mining is one of the most pervasive, efficient and profitable ways for powerful entities to track and maintain their hold on things.

As an information gathering system, data mining�s organizing principle is similarity rather than difference. It works by gathering massive amounts of information from witting and unwitting participants and then groups like patterns with like patterns. In other words, data mining finds and measures conformity and repetition. Anomalies are discarded because they represent behaviors that are too irregular to make efficient sense of. Consequently, not only does data mining deem aberrant behavior unprofitable (and therefore useless), it also sets that small percentage of people off against the majority, whose behavior data mining deems both useful and profitable. And the greater the majority, the more influential they are in determining what gets made, seen, distributed, consumed.

The big difference lately is that the influence is beginning to flow both ways. When one person (Michael Paranzino) with 900 dollars and a website can stop a billion-dollar television network from broadcasting a program he is personally unhappy with, and when another person (Markos Moulitsas) can have nearly every 2008 democratic presidential candidate flattering him because his blog is a liberal bellwether, then it�s a great day for small-scale initiative. Whither artists in this brave new world of mountain-moving, tin horn subjectivity?

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