[NetBehaviour] Tate Make Their Collection Metadata Free-as-in-Freedom

[Bjørn Magnhildøen]

Thanks for the work done so far, shardcore, and your thoughts about it.

As these categories form a contextual universe how to understand
artwork building on the level of words/tags/(search-terms), I was
thinking it a perfect base for making an endless series of descriptive
art objects - with some nods to oulipo, pataphysics and a science of
imagination, and post-conceptualism.... continuing my long ongoing
noemata project in looking at art as 'objects of thought'
(phenomenologically or otherwise, ontological). A worked-through set
of human-made categories from an established art institutition is of
great value. I see them as more aristotelian than kantian perhaps in
the bottom-up practicality - (tagging of experience more than a
philosophical structuring of possible experiences).

The conceptual space created by the categories could, secondly,
function as instructions for artwork, an instructive art - bringing it
out of the imaginary only.

Going a step further, one could try to fill up the conceptual space by
driving the potential artwork through other databanks/search engines
to make it more tangible (though in an off-beat, parodical way maybe,
well net art).
Or another way I'd like to explore it is through using own, often
formless, work and (dis-)placing them inside the categorical world, in
a sort of mutation by its code (as their 'phenomenological'
understanding is altered by the concepts).

Another possible usage which would be interesting to see, is how the
categories could be facilitated to predict new artwork, in a way how
the financial market are predicted by technical analysis of trends. An
artist could use the tool to make new artworks within popular
categories, finding the right pitch for success (this also on an
ironical foot). For this purpose, present each category/tag as a graph
fluctuating in popularity over time, so one could analyze it somewhat
like google trends. Maybe this is very obvious - though it would also
have predictability, and one could 'invest' in wokring on
'non-representational', 'gestural', 'banal', 'machinated' art....

Thanks again,
Bjørn


On Sun, Nov 10, 2013 at 1:25 PM, shardcore <shardcore at shardcore.org> wrote:
> Thanks for the kind works, everyone.
>
> autoserota is really just the baseline model of what I'd like to do with this dataset.
>
> As I mentioned in the blogpost, the most interesting categories, for me, are the more subjective ones, the categories which feel like they're furthest along the 'I need a human to make this judgement' axis. This dataset goes beyond simple 'fact based' descriptions, which means it contains a whole lot more humanity than most 'big data'.
>
> We can imagine machines which spot the items within a representational work (look at Google Goggles, for example) but algorithms which spot the 'emotions and human qualities' of a work are more difficult to comprehend. These categories capture complex, uniquely human judgements which occupy a space which we hold outside of simple visual perception. In fact I think I'd find a machine which could accurately classify an artwork in this way a little sinister...
>
> The relationships between these categories and the works are metaphorical in nature, allusions to whole classes of human experience that cannot be derived from simply 'looking at' the artwork. The exciting part of the Tate data is really the 'humanity' it contains, something absolutely essential when we're talking about art - after all, culture cannot exist without culturally informed entities experiencing it.
>
> This data is represented in JSON, it's been expressed in a machine-readable form explicitly for algorithmic manipulation. It gives us a fascinating opportunity to investigate how machines can navigate a cultural space, precisely because it's been imbued with 'cultural knowledge' by the hard-working taggers of The Tate.
>
>
>
> On 9 Nov 2013, at 23:30, Rob Myers wrote:
>
>> On 09/11/13 03:07 PM, Bjørn Magnhildøen wrote:
>>> "can you see the $x and the $y?"
>>
>> Yes it's very simple but the effect of framing it as a question makes it
>> very effective IMO. :-)
>>
>>> i'd like to do something with the categories themselves, interesting
>>> how the concepts surrounds and defines the works
>>> thinking of an descriptive art from it
>>> or instructive art
>>> then mutated art maybe
>>> algorithmic selection
>>> "as stated", dictated, mutated
>>
>> Definitely. Once we know how existing objects are described we can
>> describe objects that don't yet exist. :-)
>>
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