Artist Category Week 9: Apartment

Apartment, Marek Walczak and Martin Wattenberg

Apartment is a program designed by Marek Walczak and Martin Wattenberg that constructs spaces based on the text input from viewers. Visitors are confronted with a blinking cursor and as they begin to type rooms take shape in the form of a two-dimensional plan, similar to a blueprint. The program is able to recognize semantic connections in the visitor's type and then connects them based on theme. Buildings and cities are clustered according to their linguistic relationships.

Apartment seems to be based on a tenant of phenomenological philosophy - that spaces are definied by memory and language and we construct them in our minds not based on dimensions or physical properties but on the memories and ideas that we associate with them. The project almost seems to be an attempt to essential map our minds - to discerne how our different patterns of thought can be translated into a visual component.

The project envisioned by Walczak and Wattenberg can be concieved of in a similar vien to the type of alternative mapping we are exploring in class, but structured in an opposite formation. Rather than going out into an actual environment and distinguishing between different elements that physically define the space, Apartment instead takes our own mental patterns, a purely intellectual pursuit that have no concrete manifestation, and constructs an environment that is definied by their relationships. The element being mapped is then our own trains of thought and their intersticies, and the environment in which these elements are located is a visual representation of our own conciousness.

The ideology behind the project is imaginative and enaging, although its practical implimentation through the programming designed by its creators seems to be limited in constructing a project of the scope imagined. Computers, fortunately, are not yet people, capable of the intricate process of connotation and autonomous linguistic patterns. While Walczak and Wattenberg may have created a comprehensive database of the english language based on definition, it seems impossible to fully express the enormous amount of associations contained in each individual word or to take into account the matter of individual interpretation. The program is tremendous for its potential to create a primitive landscape of the mental realm, but at this current stage I do not think there is the technology available to fully map the mind. I truely hope that day never is realized either, because I dread the thought that all the enormous power of the human imagination can be reduced down to a code that can be read through a computer.

Artist Category Week 8: Feed

Feed (detail), Mark Napier, 2001

Feed is a system created by Mark Napier that "unravels the web". It reads the information - HTML and images - of a specific URL and reduces them into a stream of text and images. The feed is fed to nine displays that chart, graph and plot the data. Similar to many of Napier's other online projects, including The Shredder, Feed is designed to create an aesthetic visual experience that is based on a purely random computation of raw data.

Napier's work addresses the issues of "authorship" and "ownership" that are intrinsically redefined when art is created through a digital medium. In projects like Feed that incorporate an essential degree of interaction from viewers in order to operate (inputing a URL), the question is raised over who has claim to the visual product - Is the engineer who designed the code that randomizes the image the artist? Is the visitor who defines the URL to that is "fed" the constructor of the image? Is the person who created the webpage that is being randomized the author?

Can there be an author at all of media on the web? Feed highlights the fact that everything online is composed of data - of binary codes that are meaningless unless they are read by a computer. Despite the fact that individuals may organize these codes into a variety of images and text, each pixel can be reduced down to a single number. Can anyone really claim property over a series of 1s and 0s? If so - to what extent? How much information must be involved for a piece of data to be considered unique?

The issue of randomization in producing computer-based graphical images also highlights the problem of claiming authorship. In design programs such as Photoshop and Illustrator, many of the tools that can be utilized function according to a computer-based randomization system. If artists utilize these tools in the creation of images, can the products they produce really be considered an expression of their own design or are they credited only to the computer's inner operating system. Again, there also is the question of the extent to which this applied, and when can we say a work is ours and when is it just a random orientation of pixels created by a program?

This issues of authorship are relevant to me as a producer of online media and as a victim of creative theft of online media. The extent to which someone who produces a digital graphic - or even creates a unique HTML code - can lay legal claim over their work still seems to lie in a gray zone.