20 Years of Data: Posting Cards From The Past
After much deliberation, I decided to call this project The Datatypes Project: Abstract Assembly. I had many other titles in mind. What I really wanted to treat, in an aesthetic manner, were data structures. I could have called it Abstract Data Types or just The Data Project. I ended up with Datatypes and threw in the notion of assembly, abstract assembly, to indicate that the project is about abstractions and building abstract objects, treated in an artistic fashion in the case at hand.
This project is part of a much bigger project whose current working title is "20 Years of Data". Many projects over the last 20 years have culminated in this "grand vision", which is at once a work of autobiography, of self-portraiture, one could say it is a work of sousveillance, of the contemporary artist meeting the archivist meeting the "Quantified Self". It is the artist telling his story through a form of abstract, phenomenological, historiographic, autobiographical "data journalism".
It is a work of self-narration, of the artist telling himself the story of his own becoming as an artist. I have chosen to narrate the story of my development as an artist through data, through my personal archives, which is where the number "20" comes from, for I have been meticulously and rigorously keeping personal archives at least for the past 20 years.
[ENTER THE ARCHIVES]: The History-Project, circa 2001-2006
Autobiographical notes from the archives outlining the concept(s) behind the original History-Painting, circa 2001:
07/27/01 3:53:11 PM
L. bought me a canvas, a Masonite board, a 6x8, I think, and I need to find out what to paint on it. To do this I need to find out what’s been on my mind lately. Well, I’ve been reading a lot. I read ‘Formal and Transcendental Logic’ by Edmund Husserl, so I have a bit of formal ontology fresh in my mind. Added to that is a book I just finished called ‘Art History’s History’ by Vernon Hyde Minor, published in 1994. That took me through all the ages of art history, and should be useful for a painting. I want there to be perspective, proportion. What are important icons in art history? How can I paint art history onto a canvas? I could stick with an abstraction and just give it tons of depths, fields, planes, all of the above. I want perhaps to stick to white and black, just make a Borduas-like historical painting. I could throw in some green and yellow or red. What would be the appropriate colors to use? What are the present colors in my consciousness? [colors present] The incipience of forms. Forms moving onto the plane of formal existence. The birth of art history. I have to think about this.
07/27/01 5:21:26 PM
Concerning the painting, so far I have a white background in acrylic. Form, painting. There’s something to be said right there, regarding forms and the art of painting. What exists between me and the painting? What do me and the painting possibly make together? What forms can I project onto the canvas from my unconscious or from my imagination? I’d like to paint a rhetorical figure, irony or something, maybe I’ll finally paint my first allegory.
07/27/01 8:17:19 PM
I decided to paint an allegory of history in red, yellow, and black squares floating over a disjointed white surface. Each square is a construction, or a discursive formation of sorts. The concept isn’t all figured out yet. But the painting, well, it’s pretty much finished, although I only worked 20 minutes on it. I’ll let it dry and work some more on it next week. The concept I will work on till then and maybe I can do a series of works and call it all ‘The Allegory of History’. It’s the allegory of history because I’m calling it history, and it’s an allegory because the discursive formations are separate and floating in empty space, or in a gridlock. Another allegory of history could be the portrait of a man, but a man who is all broken up. In history we have synchronies and diachronies. Each can be painted. A synchrony in painting is translated as a mosaic. That’s what I tried to make, but each piece of the mosaic is just an abstraction; I could have made them portraits, and at heart I wanted to make copies of famous paintings and call it the allegory of art history. That I’ll do on a bigger canvas. I’ll really concentrate on the space between the squares or rectangles.
That was the first painting in a series of paintings that went on for several years, collectively called The History-Project. It included over 1000 pages of text, hundreds of images, and entire concept-albums full of original music. Yet at the heart of it all was the desire to paint the concept of History.
The project itself was a failure in the sense that I did not attain the objective, though I was prolific in my production of unique works of art. I in fact created an interconnected network of art objects, indelibly linked to my own day-to-day experience, my personal history, and of course, my archives.
That project, at least in part, has led to this: The reduction of an entire field of possible abstractions to a finite number of precise, discrete structures and types. It is through the lens of these types and structures, through the data I have accumulated over the course of decades, that I tell the same story, only differently this time. I like to think that I have added a new layer of method to the madness.
abstract data type: A set of data values and associated operations that are precisely specified independent of any particular implementation.
data structure: An organization of information, usually in memory, for better algorithm efficiency, such as queue, stack, linked list, heap, dictionary, and tree, or conceptual unity, such as the name and address of a person. It may include redundant information, such as length of the list or number of nodes in a subtree.
via NIST - Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures
A data structure is a way of storing and organizing data in a computer. Data, in fact, are nothing more nor less than "values of qualitative or quantitative variables, belonging to a set of items". It really is just a low-level abstraction. Hence, we have the beginning of the main ideas or first principles, if you will, to be exhibited and exposed in The Datatypes Project: Abstract Assembly. Stay tuned, updates will be forthcoming.
