Fabian Prieto's List: Databases

• data visualization art is concerned with the anti-sublime. If Romantic artists thought of certain phenomena and effects as un-representable, as something which goes beyond the limits of human senses and reason, data visualization artists aim at precisely the opposite: to map such phenomena into a representation whose scale is comparable to the scales of human perception and cognition
• distinguishing the “forest” from the “trees

• this chapter provides an art historical and philosophical context for understanding information visualization projects undertaken as artistic research

• the "data storehouses" of the oral cultures of the past were the elders who would pass down information from generation to generation
• There is no digital art or new media object in the broadest sense that does not have a layer of code and algorithms, even if its physical and visual manifestation distracts from this underlying layer.
• project Carnivore
• retrieval and filtering of data in multiple ways
• A database essentially is a system that comprises the hardware that stores the data: the software that allows for housing the data in its respective container and for retrieving, filtering, and changing it, as well as the users who add a further level in understanding the data as information
• The data container itself is not by nature beautiful, but rather seems to be characterized by non- or anti-aesthetics:
• The common understanding of ‘database aesthetics’ seems to be more focused on the operations on the ‘front end’--the concept of the algorithms, its visual manifestations, and cultural implications--rather than the ‘back end’ of the data container and its structure

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• Like narrative, the database also represents a basic way of organising human experience