Connecting the Meta-Body: Artist as Bridge-Builder
New Alexandria
October 2003
Nature of the Work
The nature of the proposed work is to create a database-driven web-interface to explore the complex human/eco-systems of our world. Although information is abundant, tools for accessing and understanding it are not. This project places the artist in the role of messenger and educator, using technology to form a bridge between society and information.
Underlying Concept and Research Question
The underlying concept and principle is that technology is a meta-body of society. It consists of bones (metals and materials stronger than the flesh), muscles (engines and pistons to drive the bones), blood (fuel to power the parts), and a nervous system (telephone and wireless communication to transmit messages). Within this structure, silicon-based machines have come to represent an emerging consciousness. The next phase is to map DNA in place of the silicon CPU via a network-level system, which will inform the next phase of body/tool symbiosis. I seek to understand how to change the way we process information. How can we use technology not just as a tool to look up disparate pieces of information, but also as an interface to systemic understandings of patterns in nature? And in answering this question, how do we map the disconnected parts of the meta-body to form a unified whole?
Proposed Project
Imagine a catalogue with many layers of information that can be tuned like a radio. However, it is a radio that can be tuned to several stations at once and blended together to form your favorite kind of music. Using this metaphor, you can look at the disease rate in a neighborhood and overlay the toxicity of the soil where its food was grown. You can likewise cross-reference data such as weather patterns, economic cycles, indigenous plants, migratory patterns, etc. In this way, there is a tool available that can associate disparate fields of information to create new meaning and realize patterns. The influences of such a tool are limitless, as it can affect value and policy. Due to the scope of this project, I propose creating a prototype consisting of a roadmap and key components. The prototype will focus on environmental data with the intention of laying a cornerstone for the newly developing field of Environmental Epidemiology. Environmental Epidemiology merges environmental policy with law and addresses human rights in relation to the comprehensive flow of toxicity through air, soil, water, and the body. It is presently crippled by a lack of discursive tools. I propose the aim of this prototype to be such a tool, laying the foundation and framework for the inclusion of more varied fields of study.
Collaboration
This project will require a versatile reservoirs of inter-disciplinary thinking. Networking elements of that community and the surrounding region can provide a foundation for a project of international scale. I propose forming a mapping committee to outline methods for creating a collaborative research system that is robust enough to become a fundamental tool to the bio-technical and agricultural industries (areas of great importance to the Pittsburgh region). The type of collaborators involved would be artists, scientists and systems engineers. Preferred artists would be focused on ecological and environmental art-making and other interdisciplinary study. Scientists would be including but not limited to ecologists, environmental engineers, biologists, meteorologists, farmers, biochemists, geneticists and botanists. Systems engineers would be computer scientists focused on creating distributed operating systems. In relation to Carnegie Mellon, I see possible collaborations with 3R2N and the Nine Mile Run project, parties from MCS in Bio-informatics and Genetics, and parties from SCS in Distributed Systems, Operating Systems, Data Mining and the HCII. Outside of CMU there are also potential collaborators at the University of Vermont, University of California at Berkeley and Ohio State University in the area of ecosystem studies. There are also bio-informatics and genetics researchers at University of Pittsburgh, as well as independent consultants, corporations and organizations with whom I have an existing working relationship.
Community Impact
This project would most readily impact all levels of education and research. I see this system affecting research at the educational (K-12 and college), corporate and governmental levels. Whereas collaborative research methods are often exclusive to researchers, this system is intuitive and open enough to be accessible to shareholders, directors and decision-makers as well. This creates an opportunity to open a new arena of public and educational works, which informs and involves citizens, as well as contributing to formal and accepted research. Because this work gives intuitive access to vast information about the world we live in, it has the capacity to relate to anyone.
Resources
Project resources would be engaged in two main ways: formation of a think tank/mind-share from regional collaborators to create a roadmap for development of the proposed system and the utilization of computing technologies to create 'sketches' of what the system would look like. Collaboration with others outside of the Pittsburgh area can be done via email and occasional long-distance conference calls. Creation of prototypes may involve student programmers (either as part of their project electives, or as work/study). Testing prototypes will involve computing resources of a campus.
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