Da(r)ta.

. . . if it wants to be relevant, it is within and across this stream of data that 'art work' must henceforth be undertaken. For it is here, here within the very grain of matter itself, that political and cultural action of every kind must now locate itself.

- Geoffrey Batchen, "Manifest Data," Afterimage (May/June 1996)

In his new book Mediauras (1996), Samuel Weber sets out to articulate what he calls the "differential specificity" of television. This, he is anxious to assure us, is not the same as seeking its "universal essence," but rather represents an attempt to determine the differences between television and other media such as film, and to acknowledge what an "extremely complex and variegated phenomenon" TV is. He sets out on this mission by first identifying "three distinct, albeit closely interrelated, operations" that he argues are necessary to television - production, transmission and reception. He therefore begins his analysis, as do most commentators on TV, by positing a tripartite communication model (encoder-message-decoder) that works to divide television's form from its content. The assumption is that television operates like a cable system, a direct and unimpeded flow of programmed images from corporate studio to domestic monitor. But what happens if we conceive TV a little differently, not as a signal between two points, but as an indiscriminate and all-encompassing atmosphere of electronic data, a field of impulses that continually surrounds and traverses us whether a monitor is present or not?

This conception imagines television to be yet one more manifestation of the voracious data economy that characterizes contemporary capitalist life. It thereby joins the Human Genome Project (which assumes the human body to be no more than so much organic data), Corbis Corporation (which sells images in the form of infinitely reproducible digital files), the Archer Daniels Midland Company (which provides farmers with information derived from the Pentagon's Global Positioning System [GPS] of satellites), the music industry (which has sold six billion CDs of digital sound since 1982), EarthWatch (a company that sells customers images of anywhere on earth beamed down from its orbiting satellites), and the CIA (which calls the electron "the ultimate precision-guided weapon" and worries about the United States's vulnerability to data-oriented warfare) in seeing the world in terms of the configuration, exploitation, distribution and potential disruption of data. This essay is about the possibility of a cultural engagement with this economy, a type of data-art (or da[r]ta) that takes the electronic universe to be its given medium as well as its subject.

It should be conceded from the outset that da[r]ta is an attitude rather than a specific practice, and as such is not a new phenomenon. Even leaving aside the long history of artists involving themselves with either technology or information (or both), there are also other more unexpected precedents for a data-based art. An essay by Ronald Gedrim, "Edward Steichen's 1936 Exhibition of Delphinium Blooms: An Art of Flower Breeding," (History of Photography, Winter 1993), reminds us that Steichen's first one-person exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art was in fact a large, three-gallery display of his own flowers. As Steichen made clear in his statements on flower breeding, this exhibition was a technological as much as an aesthetic statement, a celebration of the cultural possibilities of genetic engineering. Although this may seem a somewhat benign art practice, its iconoclasm is shared by those currently producing da[r]ta. Nowadays, however, the data that gets "engineered" tends to be cultural rather than genetic in origin (a distinction, it should be said, that the work itself calls into doubt). Most importantly, da[r]ta is a consequence of a decidedly symbiotic relationship between artists and a given electronic field; computer hackers rather than botanists are the models of choice. Indeed, it might be said that those who produce da[r]ta don't so much play God as consort with the devil.

One of those devils is network television. Many artists have lamented the power of these networks even as they pine to get on the "air waves" they radiate, the aim being to replace their present content with some other, more independent programming. A pair of Australian operatives, Grieg Pickhaver and John Doyle, have chosen another approach; they simply take over television's existing "content" and make it their own. Performing as H. G. Nelson and Rampaging Roy Slaven, the two have over several years built up a dedicated national audience for their radio program, titled This Sporting Life, broadcast on government-run station 2JJJ-FM. Running for four hours every Saturday, the satirical program comprises Nelson and Slaven, claiming to be ex-sporting greats turned expert commentators, giving a hilariously scurrilous account of Australian life, past and present. As soon becomes clear to their listeners, sport in Australia has no boundaries, encompassing everything from politics to art to public morality. The program's humor can only be described as Hogarthian, involving a level of sexual innuendo and near-libelous commentary that simply would not be possible in the U.S. Roy and H. G. (the two have become such nationally recognized figures that many real sportspeople claim them as close friends, thus becoming part of the duo's ongoing joke about the dubious authenticity of media personalities) have even run all-night programs covering the counting of the Federal election results, a contest open to all sorts of sporting analogies and pertinent slander.

However, their most audacious intervention within Australian culture involves a truly sacred event, the annual television broadcast of the Rugby League Grand Final. This day-long extravaganza, renamed "The Festival of the Boot" by Roy and H. G., features performances not only by a series of football teams but also by such dyed-in-the-wool Rugby League fanatics as Tina Turner. The one problem Roy and H. G. have to contend with is that Australian sport is already full of provincial self-parody. Undaunted, the duo instructs its listening audience to turn on their television sets but to keep the sound off. They then offer a running commentary over the top of the TV broadcast, incorporating into their aural satire everything from the national anthem played at the opening ceremonies (which they replace with an Aboriginal pop song) to the aimless camera pans over the crowd. The result is an extraordinary phantasmagoria of images and sound during which the very form of broadcast television is held up to ridicule and critique. More than that, This Sporting Life treats television transmissions as a public sandbox, as a bountiful "natural" resource just waiting to be co-opted, reshaped and transformed.

This is an attitude shared by a number of contemporary artists. For them, television has always been a given, just another part of the infrastructure of modern life. Landscape art today is not a matter of representing nature on television but of representing television as nature. San Diego-based artist Sheldon Brown has for some time been developing a public installation along these lines that he calls "The Video Wind Chimes" (most recently seen in San Francisco in 1994). The piece consists of a sequence of video projectors, metal halide light sources and projection lenses, all mounted inside fiber-glass-winged housings. These housings hang from lamp-posts by means of universal ball joints. Connected to these joints are a set of potentiometers that transform any movement of the joint into different television tuning frequencies. The lens projects a focused television image onto the ground beneath it, displaying that part of the broadcasting spectrum that the wind has currently tuned. Nature gets to zap itself, arbitrarily changing channels according to the vagaries of a prevailing wind pattern. Standing underneath, our bodies are bathed in the pixelated cathode glow of the televisual - we become television's monitor. As the video windvane sways or turns in the air, the projected signal - actually a combination of sound and image - oscillates between static and coherence. On a windy day, this oscillation is a constant dynamic such that no one frequency remains stable for more than a second or so. The result is a constantly shifting cacophony of telebabble. One doesn't so much watch an individual channel or program as look at "television" as a total phenomenon. And one looks at this phenomenon, not in terms of the smooth flow of its content, but as an omnipresent electromagnetic spectrum.

By linking the wind to this spectrum, The Video Wind Chimes erodes any simple division between nature and culture. What it brings to our attention in place of this division is a new kind of weather pattern, a permanent electronic atmosphere whose consequences we have barely begun to comprehend. Another contributor to this atmosphere is the stream of data being beamed over the surface of the planet by the myriad of satellites that now orbit 20,000 kilometers overhead. We are all being soaked in that stream right now. Take the GPS, for instance. Launched and operated by the Pentagon, it consists of 24 satellites constantly emitting electromagnetic signals, and five ground stations on earth designed to receive and decode them. Anyone carrying the right kind of portable receiver can link up with satellites and ground stations to calculate their exact position (to within a centimeter in ideal circumstances) anywhere, anytime and in any weather. The potential military applications are obvious. But this technology is also being harnessed by agriculture conglomerates and transport companies alike to tell their customers precisely where they are - where they are, that is, within the network of data that now constitutes any location whatsoever.

New York-based architect Laura Kurgan has produced two related installations ("You Are Here: Information Drift" at the Store-front for Art and Architecture in New York City in March 1994 and "You Are Here: Museu" at the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona in November 1995) that set out to explore this emerging space of information. In both cases, Kurgan chose to use existing GPS technologies as her stylus, thus allowing her to literally draw with satellites. In the case of the Barcelona project, she installed a real-time feed of GPS satellite positioning data, from an antenna located on the roof of the museum, and displayed it, together with earlier records of mapping data, in light boxes and on the walls and floors of the gallery. Some of these "maps" spelled out the word "museu," as paced out by Kurgan holding a portable receiver. She teaches GPS to speak Catalan but also to reveal itself as an archive (as a gathering and classification of information). At the same time these drawings are of herself, of herself as spatial and temporal data, as da[r]ta. However, as she admits in the journal Assemblage (December 1994), the drawings were produced "not to pinpoint a location but to experience the drift and disorientation at work in any map or any architecture - especially the architecture of information." Given the diffusions built into the system by its military overseers (to deny its full capacities to all but its own operatives), GPS inscribes Kurgan's position as a multitude of approximations within its data base. Her drawings are therefore comprised of a series of corrected and averaged points that trace her interaction with (outer) space. "The GPS information refers to but does not simply represent the space it maps: it exceeds, transforms, and reorganizes this space into another space," Kurgan wrote in You Are Here: Architecture and Information Flows (1995), "Not a representation of space, but a space itself. Or rather, spacing itself, passage and inscription, light and motion, transmission and interface."

What's interesting about all this work is that it refuses to accept the holiness of the operational structure that Weber has posited as the essence of the televisual. Each of these projects disrupts the smooth flow of his communication model by reconceiving television and similar systems as random fields of electronic data directed at no one in particular. Having inscribed itself within this convenient host, da[r]ta industriously refigures the electromagnetic spectrum to its own perverse ends - faithfully repeating that spectrum's form, but always with a difference. In short, da[r]ta is the name we might give to a new kind of parasite, an info-virus capable of creatively infecting our planet's omnipresent artificial nature. As Jacques Derrida recounts, "This is what happens with a virus; it derails a mechanism of the communicational type, its coding and decoding. On the other hand, it is something that is neither living nor nonliving; the virus is not a microbe." Neither organic nor inorganic, nature nor culture, representation nor real - neither nor, that is, simultaneously either or - da[r]ta enjoys this same viral existence. Drawing sustenance from the very host it disorders, it can't be killed without that host also being condemned to death. Until that point is reached, da[r]ta testifies that everything - even an institution as powerful as television - can be infiltrated, occupied and, at least for a moment, made to not look itself.

GEOFFREY BATCHEN, an Australian cultural critic, is currently teaching in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.