Database Aesthetics examines the database as cultural and aesthetic form, explaining how artists have participated in network culture by creating data art. The essays in this collection look at how an aesthetic emerges when artists use the vast amounts of available information as their medium. Here, the ways information is ordered and organized become artistic choices, and artists have an essential role in influencing and critiquing the digitization of daily life.


"This book ranges over a rich data bank of thoughts about and descriptions of digital media: from the software engines of video games to the conflicting interest of the cinematic narratives, from the many skins of the stock market to the artificially intelligent spy, from the design of chip implants for the human body, to the recombinant poetics of virtual worlds. Database Aesthetics claims the attention of anyone attuned to the design of current and incoming reality." - Michael Heim, author of Virtual Realism


TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction by Victoria Vesna
Part I. Database Aesthetics

1. Seeing the World in a Grain of Sand: The Database Aesthetics of Everything
Victoria Vesna

2. Database as Symbolic Form
Lev Manovich

3. Ocean, Database, Recut
Grahame Weinbren

4. Waiting for the World to Explode: How Data Converts Into a Novel
Norman Klein

5. The Database as System and Cultural Form: Anatomies of Cultural Narratives
Christiane Paul

6. The Database Imaginary: Memory_Archive_Database v 4.0
Steve Dietz

7. Recombinant Poetics and Related Database Aesthetics
Bill Seaman

8. The Database: An Aesthetics of Dignity
Sharon Daniel

9. Network Aesthetics
Warren Sack

10. Game Engines as Embedded Systems
Robert F. Nideffer

Part II. Artists and Data Projects

11. Stock Market Skirt: The Evolution of the Internet, the Interface and an Idea
Nancy Paterson

12. Pockets Full of Memories
George Legrady

13. The Raw Data Diet, All Consuming Bodies, and the Shape of Things to Come
Lynn Hershman-Leeson

14. Time Capsule: Networking the Biological [Biotech and Trauma]
Eduardo Kac

15. Aesthetics of ecosystm
John Klima

16. Polar
Marko Peljhan