the Infome Imager

Lisa Jevbratt

Art Studio and Media Arts & Technology
University of California, Santa Barbara

Date: Friday, April 22, 2005
Place: Engineering Sciences Building, Room 2001
Time: 2:00 pm — 3:00 pm

Abstract:
In this presentation Lisa Jevbratt will discuss the ideas and creation process behind a couple of her Internet visualization projects. The act of coding is often in effect an act of writing. It is a tempting comparison; it allows us to consider the poetic and literary qualities of code, but it is of little use for someone coding in the networked reality of today. Because of their specific history, we think of computer languages and code as symbolic abstractions of natural languages, and computers as universal machines manipulating these symbols. However, today every computer exists in relation to the Internet, whether it is connected or not. Every software is potentially a networked software, a building block of the networks we live within and through. Because of this, code is no longer Text, a symbolic representation of reality - it is reality. The ontology of this reality, which I call "the Infome", is to be found in and between “environment” and “organism”. To write code is to create and manipulate the Infome. Within it, artist-programmers are more land-artists than writers, software are more earthworks than narratives. The “soil” we move, displace and map is not the soil created by geological processes. It is made up of language, communication protocols and written agreements. The mapping and displacement of this “soil” has the potential of inheriting, revealing and questioning the political and economical assumptions that went in to its construction. Moreover, this environment/organism is a fundamentally new type of reality where our methods and theories regarding expression, signification, and meaning beg to be redefined. The intelligence of the Infome lies between its components and the metaphysical is no longer an all-knowing entity outside, dictating the system, but an emergence, an occurrence within.

LISA JEVBRATT is an Assistant Professor of Art Studio and Media Arts & Technology. She has an MFA in Computers in Fine Arts from CADRE, San Jose State University. She specializes in software/network art, and information mapping and visualization.