Table Of ContentData Loam
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D A T A L O A M
SOMETIMES HARD THE FUTURE OF
USUALLY SOFT KNOWLEDGE SYSTEMS
Johnny Golding Martin Reinhart Mattia Paganelli Eds.
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Contents
8–10 Johnny Golding, Martin Reinhart, Mattia Paganelli
Introduction
Data Loam: Sometimes Hard, Usually Soft.
The Future of Knowledge Systems
11–37 Martin Reinhart
Know Your Name:
A Short History of Occidental Knowledge Systems
since the Renaissance
38–64 David Burrows
Science Fictioning Singularities:
The Diagrammatic Imaginaries of Physics
65–79 Anna Nazo
Artificial Grief:
Distribution of the Sensuous
80–106 Andrew Prescott
Pursuing Digital Transformations through
Fluorescent Green Bunnies: The Poetics of Technology
107–122 Adelheid Heftberger
Archiving for an Unknown Future:
The State Film Documentation of the GDR (SFD)
123–134 Paolo Caneppele
On Classification or Wonder Is the Denial of Analogy
135–147 Manu Luksch
ALGO-RHYTHM:
A Hip-Hop Film about Microtargeting
and Online Electioneering
148–170 Jan Groos
Crypto Politics: Notes on Sociotechnical Imaginaries of
Governance in Blockchain Based Technologies
171–193 Mattia Paganelli
Asymmetry: How Patterns of Impossibility Mark Dimensions
in Knowledge Systems
194–209 Leonard Coster and Matthias Strohmaier
Obscene Data
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Data Loam. Sometimes Hard, Usually Soft.
Exhibition AIL, Angewandte Innovation Lab
210 Exhibition Map
212 Anna Nazo
218 Jimmy Zurek
222 Martin Reinhart and Virgil Widrich
226 Henry Rogers
230 Dario Srbic
Mattia Paganelli 274
234 RIAT–Institute for Future Cryptoeconomics
Leonard Coster and 276
238 Johnny Golding Matthias Strohmaier
242 Marthin Rozo Castaño Florian Unterberger 280
248 Marc Schuran Laura Stoll 286
252 Monica C. LoCascio Despina Zacharopoulou 292
258 Juan Cruz Maurice Ernst 296
262 Manu Luksch Aura Satz 298
266 Julian Palacz Istem Özen 304
270 Sophie-Carolin Wagner Johannes Frauenschuh and 308
Maximilian Gallo
Nora Lengyel 312
DARC 316
Publication Team 320
(Maximilian Gallo,
Ivonne Gracia Murillo,
Monica C. LoCascio,
Istem Özen)
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Ivonne Gracia Murillo, Monica C. LoCascio, Maximilian Gallo 324–345
Book Designing in the Age of the Loam
Rebecca Fortnum 346–355
ReMembering
Henry Rogers 356–377
Exquisite Methods: Ruminations of
Corporeal Becoming in Artistic Research
Alberto Condotta 378–400
Diffractive Care and the Careful Accounting of It
Chantal Faust 401–425
Headwind, a Scanning Story
Gerald Nestler 426–449
Renegade Activism and the Artist-as-Collective
Johnny Golding 450–487
The Courage to Matter
Jackson 2Bears 488–491
Evanescing This Harrowed Strata
Acknowledgements 492
Imprint 494
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THE FADING IS DELIBERATE
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Introduction Data Loam: Sometimes Hard, Usually Soft.
The Future of Knowledge Systems
Although the Data Loam project officially started on 1 March 2017
with a successful PEEK grant award from the Austrian Science Fund
(FWF), its roots run much deeper into the past. Like so many consi-
derations, this one also started with a discontent that was at first dim,
but which, with growing urgency, became more concrete over
the years.
We, who still come from a world of books, libraries and archives,
expected a fruitful explosion of knowledge from the ‘world wide web’.
Along with its inventor Tim Berners-Lee, knowledge, we thought,
would be available to all at any time in the future, unrestricted and
free of charge. This accessible and literally bottomless resource would
finally help put an end to misconception, ignorance and deliberately
launched ‘alternative facts’. The generous circulation and exchange of
unfettered information would at last enable all to partake in different
forms of pedagogy, become acquainted with new stylistics of exist-
ence, enter into differing political practices, forge better forms of
governmentality and open systems, foregrounding reason, science,
poetics, art. After decades of a grey and very cold Cold War, finally an
age of freedom, acceptance and peace would begin to emerge.
Perhaps there were just too many early Marvel comic book influ-
ences, perhaps there were not enough. But as naïve as these hopes
might have been, it has nevertheless been painful not only to have
witnessed how they have remained unfulfilled—and in many arenas,
actively snuffed out; that is how, in the face of exponentially prolifer-
ating information systems, the collective promise to inhibit curiosity,
curtail experimentation, reduce collective empathy and destroy the
rule of law seems to grow stronger by the day. Coupled with this has
been the rise of autonomous systems whose algorithms of machine
learning / artificial intelligence are deeply entangled with dubious
and disintegrating forces—forces that by no means wish to make
possible the prosperity and happiness of all, on the basis of the ability
to learn and share knowledge. At best, there seems to be an endless
undermining of established knowledge-structure-production sites,
including universities, art schools, science labs, although more often
than not, the move is closer to a total destruction of these centres of
creativity—targeted willingly and perhaps even eagerly.
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The initial questions arising quite naturally from such a world view
were the obvious: who generates and manages knowledge; who has
access to it and what mechanisms are there to protect it? The insti-
tutions traditionally responsible for this have been constantly losing
visibility and the will to finance them has decreased. As a result, what
we initially began to develop in the Data Loam project was an exposi-
tion of the way in which universities and national libraries had become
suppliers of insatiable data hordes, with the knowledge created and
managed there as just another resource to be mined. But what also
became clear was that many of the knowledge-based environments
mentioned above (and we could add Google and other search engines
platforms) did not have a particular political agenda as such. It was as
if the knowledge business had spectacularly taken off in some sinister
way, which in turn was (and remains) able to provide raw material
for something even more devastating. It was not too difficult to find
that the algorithms established for popular search engine enquiries
always led to a single peak landscape of knowledge, one wherein the
periphery was always-already forcibly deserted. To put this slightly
differently, by following certain algorithmic codings which sought
to categorise into manageable, indexical assemblages vast bits of
data, more often than not, they were underwritten by the best placed
corporate bids or the highest amount of ‘hits’ or engorged by faceless
trolls and their bots.
In this context, the overriding problem for Data Loam was to see if we
could rethink search engine codings in such a way that the exponen-
tial explosion of data would be a ‘good problem’. Could we create
a system that, rather than trying to dampen down this exponential
proliferation, required it. Rather than attempting to straightjacket /
cut-down information into tiny packages of manufactured truth-bits,
might there be some other way to work with, rather than against, this
contemporary explosion of information? What we came to realise was
that by our decision to go with the (multi-directional, infinite) flow, a
completely different understanding, method, and eventually also, cat-
aloguing and retrieval system framing different fields of knowledge,
new and old, was possible and desirable.
At one level, this was nothing less than a holistic, discursive approach,
one without distillative categories or a homogeneous, overarching
set of definitions. Not only was this crucial, because the old systems
were collapsing under a tsunami of information, but also because the
process of information retrieval, circulation and exchange no longer
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simply ‘belonged’ only to humans. More often than not, it was now a
distributive affair, proliferating via machine learning, and operating
beyond the threshold of perception and linear temporality. Future
knowledge systems could, depending on certain functional process-
es, not only infinitely expand but also, and importantly, self-organise
whilst simultaneously circulate, plateau, dissolve or morph.
Instead of getting lost in the concepts of the post-human, data
mining and some loose understanding of ‘the network’, Data Loam
favoured a more practical move. This entailed shifting the focus away
from the so-called hard sciences towards art, art making and the
open ended propositions entrenched in the world of ‘making’. This
was in part because we wished to maintain and indeed privilege the
role of curiosity, wonderment, and the logics of sense, where series,
recursivities, fractals, slices of intensity, colour, tone, energy, move-
ment were crucial to the meaning and magic of the everyday.
What unfolds in this book, then, is a more detailed love affair with
knowledge and intelligence, meaning and making, one that is inti-
mately acquainted with the digital, the artificial and the wild prolif-
eration of data. It is not just a fabulous romp with art and its tech-
nologies, new and old (though it is at least that). In retrieving and
highlighting sensuous making, particularly in tandem with (and as
an expression of, though sometimes quite distanced from) digital
systems, autonomous, machinic, internet or otherwise—a whole new
chapter re-focussing the Enlightenment away from its 18th century
moorings around reason and the rise of the individual and relocated
into the 21st around distributed intelligence and the proliferation
of data—begins to surface. Profound methodological implications
emerge, not only for political theory, philosophy, poetics, literature
and contemporary art, but also for the heretofore separated knowl-
edge systems of science, technology, engineering, each now enliv-
ened by their ‘sticky cohesions’ with each other. To put this slightly
differently: the loam—a residue sometimes hard, mostly soft—when
expressed via the rampant acceleration of data proliferation, circula-
tion and exchange, is a rather precious, albeit strange, entity. Vibrant
and disruptive, flowing and yet at times steadfast, both segment and
infinite plane, it names a kind of dynamic discourse, closer to that of a
living, breathing, shape-shifting mesh. Its connections are self-organ-
ising complexities, which require the practical activities of distributed
intelligences. We reclaim this as nothing less than art.
Johnny Golding, Martin Reinhart, Mattia Paganelli
London / Vienna
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