Databases and Authorship: Redefining Authority

The Author is Dead. Long Live the Author.

Despite much hysteria to the contrary, the author is not dead. But shifts toward collaboration, participation and viewer or user empowerment have certainly rearranged dominant conceptions of what it means to author. In exchange for a multiplicity of modes of authorship we forfeit certain long-standing expectations of control and containment of artistic expression and meaning.

In exhibiting my documents on a user-generated database, in this case the photos I uploaded to Flickr, the database has subverted my intentions for expression, for better and for worse. The database does this in the following ways:

Linearity:

Any one of my pictures can be accessed in any sequence. This is a dramatic change. I had envisioned my book project as unfolding along a very particular path, both moving through the space of a library from entrance to destination and from a general overview to a very particular commentary. I had carefully planned the organization of the book to elicit a certain user experience and intellectual progression contingent on following a series of connected steps.

Out of sequence, my project is certainly not coherent in any of the ways I had envisioned. The work is reduced from a line of talk to room full of whispers. Individually the pictures are pretty tame. And of profound relevance for flickr, not very pretty either.

Context:

My pictures exist in a sea of other pictures, both my own and those uploaded by other users. Not only are my pictures viewed out of sequence, but they are relocated within a totally alien context of other media. They have been decontextualized and recontexualized in ways I cannot anticipate. Among other things, this has the effect of increasing superficiality in exchange for breadth.

You can access my flickr account via this blog. You can access this blog via search engines and other blogs. To some degree the (motivated!) viewer knows what I write about (preoccupations, interests, concerns, etc.), my value systems, who is connected to me, what they write about, and their value systems. My project is now exhibited in a much larger web of authorial identity not contained within the initial work. This context provides an unanticipated level of reading I had no intention of including within my original work, but is integral to a networked new media identity.

Filters:

Views. Comments. Favourites. “Interestingness.” Groups. Tags. Photo Pools…

In responding to user preference and expectation with organizational parameters and behaviours, the database itself must be credited with some degree of authorship over my work. The way in which the database organizes and orders my documents (i.e. “interestingness”), and facilitates user organization (i.e. views and comments) has a large impact on the reading of my work. Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail includes a discussion of how web 2.0 filters reorder database content. His Wired article and blog may be of interest here. With prescribed filters the perpetually adaptive container perpetually informs content.

Interaction:

A book is material. It gets used and altered through interaction. The “data” of the document gets manipulated over time in profound ways akin to new media commentary, tags and other contextual elements. My project attempted to play with the material nature of the book, how users physically turn pages, and how the book as document changes materially through use. Book two-point-oh?

If elements of this work make sense in a non-linear, decontexualized, virtual environment it is only because they refer to our experience with material books. Self-reflexivity seems to make little sense when translated to other forms.

A New Type of Artist and a New Type of Art:

Vesna observes that “artists working with digital media, particularly on the networks, are acutely aware of information overflow and that design of navigation through these spaces has become a demand of aesthetic practice,” but how can we account for user-generated databases like flickr in which the artist has little control over user experience? We must accept that aesthetic practice has been reconfigured in this type of database environment. These new ways of engaging with aesthetic practice in collaborative, participatory, virtual environments means rethinking concepts of “the artist” and “the author.” What’s an artwork and who does it belong to? Who and what is it for?

But the Author is not dead; the database just lets us open a dialogue about what we are really willing to relinquish in order to redefine what that terms means.