DATAESTHETICS

Data has become the most pervasive - and intangibly invasive- feature of contemporary life; of life become data. Life systems have been the object of sustained data gathering since the time of the Enlightement, and cartography, flow charts, graphs and statistical databases have played a preponderant role in the shift from a society based on discipline to contemporary regimes of biopolitical control.
Art production long sought to protect the relatively autonomous sphere it had eked out for itself from any incursion by the potentially deadening logic of knowledge production and data gathering and display. In the face of the sheer glut and facile allure of purpose-driven information and rationality, art`s self-assigned role was to affirm its radical uselessness. Yet as knowledge use has become inseparable from the exercise of power, many practitioners have chosen to use the strength of data to challenge and potentially subvert data-power. Critical cartography, tactical magic, database use and research have become integral components of artistic competence, which refuses to leave social critique to the social sciences.