The Art of Database

Much digital art has a database of files as it’s content. In several pieces that I’ve done both in collaboration with Peter Sinclair and in my own solo work assembling the files for the database is a key, if unseen, element to the work.

In A Soapopera for Laptops and A Soapopera for iMacs (1998-2005) a database of text files that were spoken by text-to-speech voices were assembled. The four characters, Fred, Ralph, Princess and Kathy correspond to the native synthetic voices of the Mac OS. Each character had a series of conversational tidbits, repartee, songs and exclamations. The front-end programming, a Max MSP patch assembled the text and fed it to the voices to be spoken using keywords triggered by speech recognition. Therefore the art of database has a synchronic two-part process, the files are assembled according to the manner in which they will be presented by the front-end program and the front-end program is written with the database in mind.

If you happened to be crisscrossing the border on August 26, 2005, you might have caught site of those ubiquitous yellow caution “3 People Running Across” signs along Interstate 5 and Interstate 905 between Tijuana and San Diego that were modified to say "Free Market", "Wanted", "No Benefits", and "Now Hiring".

washingtonpost.com

Buffing Up The Image Of George Washington
Mt. Vernon Creates A Toothsome Teen

By Libby Copeland
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 30, 2005; C01

Despite what he looks like on the dollar bill, it turns out George Washington may have been kind of hot.

WHAT ON EARTH
by PETER SCHJELDAHL
A Robert Smithson retrospective.

The New Yorker
Issue of 2005-09-05

Robert Smithson is in fashion, in a hair-shirt kind of way. Excited reverence has marked the art-world response to a retrospective of hi work that opened in Los Angeles last year and is now at the Whitney. This may seem odd, given that Smithson, the mystagogical dandy o postminimalism, who died in a plane crash in 1973, at the age of thirty-five, was a sculptor who made exactly one good sculpture: “Th Spiral Jetty” (1970), a coil of rocks and dirt made with earth-moving equipment, in a remote bay of the Great Salt Lake, which few peopl have seen except in handsome but inevitably misleading photographs. (Underwater for many years, it reëmerged in 2002.) I paid my ow first visit recently, jolting over rudimentary dirt roads. The piece is initially disappointing: a rather dainty geometrical figure that, at about hundred and fifty feet across, is too small—not by a lot, but fatally so—to hold scale against the sun-stunned, distantly islanded lake, ami hills that are strewn with black basalt boulders. (It is within sight of another, truly huge jetty, the site of long-derelict facilities that were onc used for extracting oil from some still seeping, odorous tar pits. Smithson, who loved ruins, wrote about it in connection to his work, but strangely, few others have taken it into account.) The “Jetty” improves dramatically when you tread its jagged surface, which is lapped b syrupy, clear water that is tinted pink by algae, and encrusted with formations of ice-white salt left over from the jetty’s intermitten submersions. Out there, I felt mightily centered in the ambient desolation. In the course of an afternoon, I asked occasional fellow-tourist why they had come. All said that they had heard of the “Jetty” and reckoned that it was something to see—usually along with the nearb Golden Spike National Monument, where, periodically, old-timey locomotives reënact the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad, i 1869. (People seemed puzzled when asked if they liked the work. One said, “It’s O.K.”

Taylor Mead by Clayton Patterson

August 25, 2005

The Lower East Side, Up Close and Personal

By JOHN STRAUSBAUGH

If you have attended any public gathering on the Lower East Side or in the East Village over the last 25 years - a punk rock gig, a community board meeting, a poetry slam, a Santeria service, the infamous Tompkins Square Park riot in 1988 - chances are you're somewhere in Clayton Patterson's archives. He was the bearish man with the billy goat beard and the biker fashion sense mingling with - but never blending into - the crowd, observing everything through a still or video camera.

"Gay Batman" Artist Gets "Cease & Desist"

Artnet News

Aug. 18, 2005

"GAY BATMAN" ARTIST GETS "CEASE & DESIST" D.C. Comics has hit a Chelsea art dealer with a "cease & desist" letter for exhibiting Mark Chamberlain’s watercolors on a "gay Batman" theme. The works, which were exhibited at Kathleen Cullen Fine Art this spring (where they found ready buyers at prices starting at $200), include images of Batman and Robin exchanging a kiss, a watercolor titled Robin’s Baby Pictures depicting the Boy Wonder’s cute rear end, and a rendering of the Caped Crusader, sans shirt but otherwise in costume, striking a languorous pose. "D.C. Comics wants me to hand over all unsold work and invoices for the sold work," exclaimed dealer Kathleen Cullen (the gallery was formerly named Artek Contemporaries). "I’ve spent the last two weeks of my life consulting lawyers!" (Some works are also posted on Artnet, which has received a similar letter.)