Data Art

People are constantly questioning whether or not technology is deteriorating human relationships. With new communication tools, one can look at numerous environments and definitely see a reliance on e-mail and online chat rooms instead of face-to-face dialog. I have taken Internet classes where I never met my teacher or any of my classmates before. People can work at home and even some who do work in the office may only know their boss as a name that signs e-mails. What I like about this article is that it reminds us to not forget about human subjectivity. People can already create data art by making something impersonal attractive, but “maybe the more important challenge is how to represent the personal subjective experience of a person living in a data society.” I think it is interesting to think about how art use to express the sublime, but now with cyberspace, something majority cannot comprehend, we want to simplify things. Maybe it is to make the unknown presentable to those who do not understand it fully so they do not feel intimidated or scared of the new media.

One of my favorite metaphors that the author uses is comparing media access and the manipulation of software to the remix of a DJ. I like this example because it references Adobe Acrobat Reader, a program I use almost everyday. I just thought the arrow buttons were arrow buttons, but they actually resemble a tool we are already familiar with, a VCR. Things are the way they are because of history, and I think a lot of people, including myself, forget that. We end up skimming over and taking for granted the things that took years to develop.