Info Aesthetics

Review commissioned by Zefir7 | September 2006

Arts adepts among us were stunned by Info Aesthetics’ announcement: "visualisation and mapping of data, generative systems and non-hierarchical systems". Science people applauded: finally a chance to hear their heroes David Reinfurt and Jonathan Harris speak in the flesh.

Harris is a gifted speaker, who manages to capture both parties in the audience from the word go. His starting-point is emotional, his argument catching. He is a story-teller, who builds tools and platforms as a means to investigate human behaviour online. He may well the first digital anthropologist.

From wefeelfine.orgAs a New Yorker he mixes in with masses of people every day, but what a passer-by feels, dreams, thinks remains hidden to him. Now his project “We feel fine” is a digital platform on which you can halt passers-by for a while and tap them on the shoulder to make them reveal who they are, how they feel, and what they dream about. The programme scans blogs and online photo albums for the words “I”, “am,” and “feel”. The result is a database in the shape of a powerful visual essay.

In his other projects, too, Harris traces the footsteps we leave behind unawares on the web. Wordcount lists the 88,000 most used English words. His role as a passive observer took on a humorous twist when he launched the programme Querycount, which showed what the first terms were that people in Wordcount would search. The first was their own name, the second without exception “sex”.

Kubrick and Hitchcock films contain abstract images we label computer graphics. But how were these produced when computers had not yet come into being at all? David Reinfurt wipes off the dust of history from unremembered artists. If you think that computer images look the way they do, simply because the computer has shaped them so, then you are dead wrong, according to Reinfurt. He demonstrates that the origin of these images goes back to the Bauhaus, where Moholy Nagy built his Light Space Modulator. Subsequently he guides us past the Precision Objects by Duchamps, who played tricks on the spectator’s retina; The Solar-do-nothing-machine by Ray and Charles Eames failed indeed to do a thing, but did show a progressive form; the Mechanical Analog Computer by the Whitney brothers enriched the score of Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

Reinfurt in fact stands before us as an art historian, not a designer. He has unearthed a history of developments, which we had stored in our collective memory as technical co-incidents. That’s why we may well condone the fact his own designs are quite minimal.

At the end of the evening the arts people could feel relieved. Info Aesthetics proves much more accessible with an anthropologist and an historian on the stage. The science adepts were simply completely satisfied.