Chart by Leslie L. Lewis disclosing the structure of “Finnegan’s Wake” by James Joyce. (Nagy, 1956;347)
Joyce found a rational method to balance (such) longings for “eternity” with the cyclic recurrence of biological and historic facts, personalities and characters.
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(Nagy, 1956;344)
In a state of balance the ideal may be to feel what one thinks and to think what one feels.
Maholy Nagy, Vision in Motion, Pub. Paul Theobald and Company, Chicago, 1956 p.345
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This is all metadata to my eyes. This is a beautiful speculation from Moholy Nagy. I wonder if it infers that movement arises form a lack of balance, like the shadows of his machines on the wall, it helps me see the notion of metadata as a shadow language of descriptive containment.
Best wishes
Simon
You might be interested in Beaufort when it comes to the writing style and expression of your scientific expeditioners…
I’ve been reading a book called ‘De-fin-ing the Wind’,
subtitled,
\de-‘fining the ‘wind\ger 1: the Beaufort Scale, and how a 19th-century writer turned science into poetry
2: by Scott Huler
Nice paper (to feel) and cover but badly written in as far as Scott Huler keeps intruding on his subject with information about himself – a bit like Phillip Adams in LNL.
Nevertheless, the book is about the beauty and the visual poetry of the Beaufort Scale (measure of wind speed).
‘…What the Beaufort scale is, fundamentally, is scientific language. Its descriptions are beautiful, to be sure – but what they also are is distilled, thorough, complete…The Beaufort scale takes observation and turns it into information. That’s what was happening in the early 19th century. Observation was turning into data – science was becoming a profession, an identifiable pursuit with a standard pattern and method and even a recognizable practitioner.’
Following a description of the chaos that arose from the standardization of calendars in Europe he goes on to write,
‘This standardization of measurements, organization of perceptions, is not merely natural – it’s actually fundamental. Psychologists of perception will tell you that categorization is the fundamental perceptive activity: It’s what enables organisms to function. One of these things is not like the other- why, and what does that tell us? All organisms can make the most basic distinctions – between food and not-food, danger and safety, light and dark, same species and not-same. But only people can use language to make the highly complex categorizations of say, animals or physical forces, or however many different kinds of quarks there are now, putting them into separate piles and naming the piles. It’s how we proceed; it’s how we communicate.’
It was Beaufort who selected Darwin as a scientist to travel on the Beagle and the Voyage of the Beagle was the first time that the Beaufort Scale was officially used to describe the wind. Beaufort’s style of descriptive writing had been much admired. That is, it was a discursive unemotional style – just the facts.
However, scientists trained in this style sometimes stray from it and choose words that reveal the state of balance of their inner lives.
This is another aspect of the Maholy Nagy ideal that I suspect interests you the most.
There’s an impressive illustrated version of the Beaufort Scale in the wikipedia at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaufort_scale
Since metadata is data about data, the following line from Nagy is also relevant:
‘”Interpretations of interpretations interpreted” may have been Joyce’s desire.’
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The idea of “metadata as a shadow language of containment” implies that raw data contains information.
If this is so, there is a container.
Will the container assume the shape of the data?
Metadata in this sense would simply reflect the shape of the original data.
There is no interpretation.
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My understanding of metadata is that it is an interpretation of raw data, open to many representations.
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Motion and change are the inevitable consequences of imbalance.
We experience this every day, walking to catch ourselves falling.
Hmm…there’s a lot to say about containment. But in the main I would say that data is forced into the shape of the container, rather than the other way round.
As far as I know, the first person to ask these kinds of questions in relation to digital stuff and markup languages which are really metalanguages or containers for ideas was Ted Nelson.
Nelson, T, H. Embedded Markup Considered Harmful October 02, 1997 http://www.xml.com/pub/a/w3j/s3.nelson.html
There is a big difference between the containers needed to hold the kind of atomized data that fits into relational databases and the kind of information that doesn’t fit neatly into boxes because it tolerates recursive structures and the re-use of content along with mixing up the container with the contained.
For example, as a container, XML generally fits this model by having labeled hierarchically structured containers with a general separation between content and processing expectations, whereas, RDF (expressed as XML) creates interlocking assertions that combine to make descriptive statements.
Although the terms used to describe the elements in a metadata standard such as Dublin Core have been developed through a consensus designed to facilitate cross-domain consumption, Arts practitioners are not nearly as willing to adapt this form terminology beyond their field of interest.
If you see metadata as information at one remove from the object it describes, or structured information about something – even itself, then there are values residing in the linkage between the idea described and who or what is describing it.
As digital technologies evolve to handle formats other than text, metadata is moving into the fabric of the works themselves. MPEG-7 is an example of one of the ways that metadata can move from simple referencing of the title as an entity, to sequence, shot, frame and even pixel with the frame.
In these forms metadata can be embodied and embedded in markup. This kind of markup is a sequential and hierarchical meta-language that might not only be different for different domains but also can enforce structure on expressions that are not always structured in sequential and hierarchical ways.
In your own work the conjunctions of images that appear, both in linear sequences on any given screen and spatially aligned from one screen to another, create sparks of meaning and energy that enliven the way we experience it. But I’m not so sure about how this relates to rhythm and pace…
One of Nelson’s solutions to the problem of contamination by metadata is to deploy parallel markup (sometimes called stand-off or out-of-line) in which the object and the metadata are treated as quite separate but parallel entities.
This raises the problem of how multiple instances or overlapping hierarchies of metadata can be associated with the same object without confusion. It also raises the possibility of creating metadata at a distance from the object. It could be used as a form of remote appropriation similar to practice of web content scraping by content aggregators. If there is an accessible resource pool, it could mean that art objects could continue to find expression in multiple locations and contexts outside the control of either the creator or the custodian.
I encourage others to engage in this form of appropriation for reuse and re-presentation of the content in the Flight of Ducks. But I’m sometimes quite uneasy about doing it myself when I do. And when I do, you are quite right to say that I walk fast to prevent myself form falling – if that’s what you meant?
Best wishes
Simon
There is intruding on one’s subject with information about one’s self, and there is revealing things about one’s self through the responses one has to the subject.
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I remember you telling me how Edward Tuffte had something to say along these lines, in relation to dancers.
He compared dancers who dance to be seen with dancers who dance to reveal the dance.
The first is about Ego, and the second about Form.
A dance can be a fully choreographed ensemble.
And it can be the simple gesture of an individual.
Do you have the reference for Tuffte’s idea?
Perhaps this as an imaginary conversation. I can’t recall it. The only references I can find to dance or dancers are in Envisioning Information p.27 and 114-119, and then repeated in Beautiful Evidence. He quotes Lincoln Kirstein of the NY city ballet:
…and from a practical view,…, they (dance notations) are equally worthless.
He does examine gestural notation to some extent illustrated by stick figures. Maybe I’ve missed something…
A task for me:
Compare the styles of writing and illustrations in present day scientific papers with those of the Discovery Reports (housed in the Australian Antarctic Division Library).
Or you might consider examining the range of antarctic animations available online for patterns. Some of the ones I’ve looked at are rather gestural in form: Like this one tracking the movements of penguins:
http://www.aad.gov.au/MediaLibrary/asset/mediaitems/ml_376645983912037_small_penguin.mov
You can find the explanation at:
http://www.aad.gov.au/default.asp?casid=5635
or the use of satellite imagery showing the B-15A iceberg on a collision course with the Drygalski Ice Tongue, the floating portion of a glacier flowing off the Scott Coast of Antarctica and into the Ross Sea.
http://www.nasa.gov/mpg/105894main_crack_movie.mpg
or this gestural presentation of the continental mass of Antarctica
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NasaNews/ReleaseImages/20041006/04_a000988.mpeg
There is much that you animator’s eye could reveal here…