Had a glance this morning at Eric Kabisch's Masters Thesis called "Landscape Denatured: Digitizing the Wild". He basically describe 4 technologically enabled artworks that explore ways in which digital technologies impact society and culture, focusing particularly on the impacts of information technologies on physical and cultural geography: Datascape, Sonic Panoramas, Unexceptional.net network visualizer and SignalPlay.
What I found interesting is the framework provided for analyzing these works of art:
"To develop a framework for investigation of the processes by which digital technologies, their affordances and their artifacts shape and embed themselves in the world, I will break the process into three stages: the measuring and capturing of natural processes (sensing); the mining, analysis and representation of captured observations and models (narrative); and the introduction of these models into the world through physical or methodological means (propagation).
This framework is useful because it successfully corresponds to many of the individual cyclical and triadic frameworks that inspired the individual artworks composing the body of this thesis work. (...) It parallels notions of geographic information gathering, map production, and map-based decision-making. And it is congruent with Estonian biologist Jakob von Uexküll’s notion of the functional cycle (or Funktionskreis) whereby an organism’s subjective environment is continuously constructed through its sensing of the environment, processing of the information, and continued engagement and action within the world."
Why do I blog this? It's interesting wrt what I discussed here and what Fabien's reactions. See for instance the parallel between Funktionskreis and wiki city.
Besides, I quite liked this part of the conclusion:
"Our digitization of the world thus far is coarse, leading to gaps and pixelation. As we fill in those gaps through models and assumptions we blur certain details, while artifacts of the process are categorized as anomalies. In geographic information systems, this grey area is referred to as “uncertainty” and is not often reflected in end- user representations such as maps. The wild, ultimately, is that which we cannot record, understand, represent or control"