Italian version
. bookInformation is Alive
<book> V2_/NAI Publishers
ISBN 90-5662-310-9
The data flow and their uncertain life cycle are more than ever the subject of new media theoretician's analysis. In this digital ecosystem, they see a sort of primordial soup that is just starting to give birth to new social relations and new forms of communications. Realized as a catalogue of the Dutch Electronic Art Festival 03: Data Knitting., this anthology of critical essays and electronic art installations investigates the subject of archives as a cultural form of memory, speaking about the branches of learning directly involved in it, with a design that dedicates one third of the page to structured collections of data. Besides the intrinsic globality of the intelligibility of data, this text analyses the temporal factor, which puts an expiration date on data collection efforts, the political factor, with its many repercussions, as evidenced by the historic 'They Rule', by Josh On & Futurefarmers, and the structural factor, that is, the reconstruction of complex data starting from simple ones. The analysis by Antonio Damasio, a american neurologist, is fascinating because it compares the mechanisms of human memory to the techniques of vectorial data compression. This book is full of metaphorical zooms, like those by Manuel De Landa, Sadie Plant, Jeffrey Shaw, Ingo GŸnther, Lynn Hershman and George Dyson.