pARTs Gallery | Digital.Documentary // DocuDatamentary

"Since Sputnik, the planet has become wrapped in a blanket of electronic communications, the 'dathtmlhere,' facilitated by satellite and fibre-optic links between computer 'nodes.' International satellite data communications and TV broadcast networks have completely re-organised the flows of information, inter- and intra-state. As long ago as the LA Olympics, press photographs were shot on still video cameras, beamed via satellite to Japan to be distributed back over international press networks to appear in LA newspapers. This transformation has been so rapid and so total that few areas of western life are untouched by it.
"The electronic mediascape is about to go through another resounding change of state. Telephone, computer networks, television and interactive gaming will be digital, and thus, connectable."
Simon Penny
"Critical Issues in Electronic Media"
mitpress.mit.edu/e-journals/LEA/ARTICLES/CRITICAL.html

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The emergence of the "dathtmlhere" has significant implications for documentary photography.

First and foremost, while the humanistic idea of "bearing witness" is unlikely to go away and the preference for visual information is likely to continue, this does not mean that fixing light waves reflecting off a noumenal world will be the dominant form of documentary practice.

Let's break it down.

Convergence. The lingua franca of the dathtmlhere is digital--ones and zeros. What this allows for is the combination of multiple media. What this undermines, potentially, is the basis for "seeing is believing"--the visible light spectrum. In a digital world, it is just as easy to visualize the radio spectrum as it is the visible light spectrum. This has led, in fact, to some stunning astronomical discoveries--and related stunning images, for instance.

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Sensorium's Breathing Earth is an example of using seismographic data--measurements of the movement of the earth's crust--to create a dynamic visual representation of those events.

Connected. It is not insignificant that Sensorium's data for Breathing Earth is gathered remotely and transmitted via the network. This goes beyond the Interent as a medium of dissemination. As Marshall McLuhan suggested, the electronic network--the dathtmlhere--extend, in essence, humans' nervous system, so that one can see and hear and "touch" beyond one's physical parameters. Significantly, this gives rise to what might be called "distributed perspective." If the famous "Earthrise" photograph gave us a new sense of our world because of a completely new perspective, Breathing Earth does something similar, except not from a new one-point perspective, rather from this distributed perspective. While the ability to generate multiple-point perspective imagery (e.g. the Omnicam or Timetrack camera) is enabled by digital technologies, the ability to generate one-point perspective images from multiple vantage points is enabled by the convergence and connectedness of the dathtmlhere, and I suggest the possibility of a new practice--docudatamentary.

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Live/dynamic. The converging connectedness of the dathtmlhere also gives rise to another potentially distinctive characteristic of docudatamentary practice--the fact that information is dynamic. Breathing Earth changes every two weeks. In theory this could be on a daily basis--or even up to the moment. In fact, this is the nature of a similar project by Ken Goldberg and Wojciech Matusik called Memento Mori, which also visualizes seismographic information, albeit from a single source, but in nearly real-time (the data is cached for about 40 seconds before being drawn on the screen). The data in Maciej Wisniewski's Turnstile 2 is also displayed in real time. Just as part of photography's power and magic has been its ability to stop time, freeze a moment (Muybridge, Cartier-Bresson), part of what the docudatamentarian can do is create a stable context for information that changes--sort of like the world.

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Interaction/Participation. The final distinctive potential of docudatamentary practice is for work to be interactive. Again with Breathing Earth, this is minimally realized by allowing the viewer to change the angle of vision. With Amy Alexander and Mark Napier, the choice is even more wide-ranging. Rather than just being spectators, with docudatamentary work, it is possible to participate. What better way to learn the story being promulgated_

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Finally, so far I have focused the idea of docudatamentary practice around visualizing through data the real world. However, as the "cyberworld"--the dathtmlhere--becomes more and more real, it is important to document the dathtmlhere itself. In their own ways, this is what Alexei Shulgin and Daniel Garcia Andujar do, working to imag(in)e what is on our screens as worthy snap(screen)shots of the social dathtmlhere.

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