Curatorial Essayby Randall Packer,
Independent Curator in Associationwith the San Jose Museum of Art"It is less a question of the artist interpreting the world than of allowing existing or hypothetical biological processes, mathematical structures, social or collective dynamics, to speak directly. In this sense art no longer involves the composition of a 'message' but the creation of a mechanism.... A new type of artist appears, one who no longer relates the course of historical events. This new artist is an architect of the space of events, an engineer of worlds for billions of future histories, a sculptor of the virtual."
--Pierre Levy
"The future of identity is tactical."As an idea, "hybrid" is slippery. A hybrid can be viewed as a synthesis of forms in which elements such as object, performance, and space occur simultaneously. Duchamp's Large Glass might be thought of in this way. A hybrid might also be viewed as a migratory process in which the work evolves through a sequence of permutations along a trajectory of formal structures.
--C5
The current work of C5, the artist collective and Silicon Valley start-up associated with San Jose State University's CADRE Institute, takes a migratory path. To understand 16 Sessions as a hybrid is to view its complex operations on multiple levels.
The broad, "macro" view of the work begins with Joel Slayton's installation
Not to See a Thing, which was part of the San Jose Museum
of Art's recent exhibition Alternating Currents: American Art in the Age
of Technology. The installation, a classic study in the way we look at the
artwork as object in physical space, was the engine
manufacturing the raw data we now see recontextualized as data agencies
in virtual space in 16 Sessions.
C5: Theory as Product has held a series of public conferences and private
meetings in which theoretical position statements generate interpretations
of the meaning and significance of collected data. The results of these
performative interactions among C5 members (see *Transcript)
have contributed to the framework of 16 Sessions
as a Web-specific artwork.
Finally, this UR-like motif -- the virtualization of an object via the
performative process -- may also be applied to 16 Sessions'
own evolutionary path. Data agencies, presented as virtual
information maps derived from the installation, are mingled with the network
identity (IP address) of the Net user, who chooses to have a particular
session processed. A kind of dance occurs between the user's
IP address and the algorithm of the data agency that acts upon
it. The mingling delivers a list of IP address permutations.
Subsequent interaction with
these new IP numbers launches the user into a stratum of the Web that seems
to transform the very nature of the Web's topography. The Web is no longer
experienced as a virtual representation of geographic space, or as a hallway
of common portals; rather, it is a kind of underground substructure opening
out into the Net's vast underbelly.
One of the unique characteristics of digital
information is its ability to easily change from one form to another; its
context can be altered, but its uniqueness is preserved. Data do not care
where they live. As C5 says in its theoretical investigations into
autopoietic data systems, "The data organism is a self-perpetuating system
that maintains its identity in a changing environment."
16 Sessions is an extraordinary and original exploration of the
micro-universe that lies within our information structures, taking nothing
for granted and exposing the seemingly alchemical properties of those
structures. In a world growing increasingly rich with data -- and with
opportunity for mining those information riches -- 16 Sessions
leaves little doubt that C5 stock is on the rise.
Randall Packer is a media artist and curator on the faculty
in the Department of Art Practice at the University of California, Berkeley,
and artistic director of Zakros InterArts
(http://www.zakros.com).