Michael Goddard & Grace Kingston
The Aesthetic Paradoxes of Visualising the Networked Image
When considering an aesthetic for cloud data, it is easy to picture a large sprawling mass of interlocking nodes, mutating and all sharing information at the same time. With so many sources contributing to this abstract cloud at once, our picture of cloud data can seem ‘noisy’ with each element making sense individually yet quickly becoming unrecognizable en masse. Visualising this cloud is paradoxical in that the functional role of the cloud is one of personal hypervisibility, revealing locations, preferences and other markers of subjectivity, but via a process that remains opaque. How can these processes of cloud formation and deformation be rendered visible and what kind of topography does this produce? Such questions require both practical and theoretical responses, hence the collaboration between aesthetic practice and theory that underpins this paper.
Grace Kingston has mined shared data and responded aesthetically to such questions in her latest project – Here you are. In this paper she will discuss her deployment of the mining, imaging and social politics revolving around these data spaces, where privacy and anonymity are assumed but poorly understood. Michael Goddard will respond to Grace’s project as the making visible of the invisible penumbras or noise underlying the contemporary networked production of subjectivity. Such data visualisation aesthetics will be presented as the obverse of data mining for commercial and surveillance purposes as, instead of searching for particular subjective contents to track and exploit, it reflexively makes visible the very forms through which this circulation takes place.
Michael Goddard is Senior Lecturer in Media and PGR Coordinator, University of Salford. Michael’s recent research has centred on Polish and European cinema and audiovisual culture and he was co-editor of Studies in Eastern European Cinema (SEEC). He has just completed a book on the cinema of the Chilean-born filmmaker Raúl Ruiz. He has also been doing research on the fringes of popular music focusing on groups such as The Fall, Throbbing Gristle and Laibach. Another strand of his research concerns Italian post-autonomist political thought and media theory, particularly the work of Franco Berardi (Bifo). He is now conducting a research project, Radical Ephemera, examining radical media ecologies in film, TV, radio and radical politics in the 1970s.
Grace Kingston was born and raised in Sydney where she continues to live and practice as an artist. In her undergraduate degree at COFA (College of Fine Arts) at the University of New South Wales, she trained in painting and drawing, however, during her Honours year she branched out into installation, sculpture and photography. She received a first class Honours award, which led to an Australian Post-graduate Award scholarship for her to continue her studies in the Masters of Fine Art program. Kingston completed the MFA in 2012.