#thewhitebuilding

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Featuring SALT., Mali D. Collins, Giulia Damiani, Catherine Grant and Laura Guy.

#Stacktivism and the “means to make meaning from”

This research will draw conclusions about the different ways data associated with an artwork can be preserved, shared and displayed, and how various modes of sharing and associating data with an artwork impact the viewer’s and the creator’s ability to make meaning from artwork.

Imagine this:

I am painting in my Shoreditch studio when all of a sudden I am transported back in time to the Dark Ages. “You are from the future?” I suppose I’ll eventually be asked, “why don’t you make us something cool.” I couldn't make a car, a bridge or medicine let alone a computer or the internet.

I could, however, make some paintings.

I spent the era of Internet Art at a desk with computer code. After studying information systems and conducting research on collaborative software, I went to Google where I designed software with the goal of making employee performance reviews more productively honest. The underlying assumption was that the design of software would modify the behavior of the user.

Stating this in language adopted by stacktivists, “certain technologies internalize certain ideologies.” This is just as true in interface design as it is in classic visual arts such as painting.

Stacktivism asks us to question and investigate the ways in which we are dependant on a non-neutral infrastructure which is becoming increasingly invisible.

Stactivism is skeptical of the modes of production becoming invisible. With food, energy and

government as examples, we’ve realized that the promise of seamlessness often creates an obstruction in understanding. This is why I am useless as a time traveler. I don’t know how to make most of what I am dependant on; I don’t know even know how it works.

Similar to technology, paintings are also disappearing interfaces that hide much of what creates them or enables them to be. My art practice involves simultaneously displaying finished work alongside information about how paintings were made as an investigation of how this additional data/information impacts the viewer’s ability to create meaning from the artwork.

Many stactivism discussions revolve around our dependence on infrastructure in relation to the question, “How not to die.” Instead of how not to die, art frequently asks,” How to make meaning given that we are to die.” Stacks not only control the means not to die from but also the means of making meaning.

For most of history art has been assigned meaning based on contemporary interpretations of limited data. Time and lack of preservation methods limit historic and contemporary efforts to make meaning from artwork. The data preserved with artworks being made today considers only our current ideas of how meaning is produced.

It is no secret or uncommon complaint that the production of meaning and value in art is dependant on an infrastructure (stack) involving abstractions such as language and institutions such as schools, galleries, auction houses, and museums. We tend to keep a pretty unimaginative set of data associated with artworks: author, size, date etc. My art practice questions the data that is associated with artwork and how this data relates to the ability to make meaning.

Every painting is supported by stacks that control access to data and therefore control much of the ability to make meaning from art. By experimenting with new technologies and information architectures I challenge who is able to determine meaning from my artwork now and in the future. Through public exhibitions of this style I question how awareness of the stack changes our relationship to it.

TRANSLATED: #Stacktivism is a newly invented word that references the invisible structures that sustain our lives (the cloud where our email is stored, the electrical grid, the water coming out of our taps, political systems) but that are often not fully understood or directly accessed. For example, if the power goes out many of us can only wait for someone else to fix it.  If Facebook turns into an evil monster and violates all of the existing privacy “policies” we can only get angry and hope for legislative action that will not change the expose of our personal data.  #Stacktivism reminds us that we do not have control over much of what keeps us alive and that technology moves us further from being in control of these means.