archive – BENJAMIN DE KOSNIK

MMRL

Media Metadata Research Lab (MMRL) is a San Francisco-based art research collective
working at the intersection of data visualization, digital art, and cultural analytics. We
develop quantitative and qualitative methods for measuring and representing diversity in
media. MMRL members are Abigail De Kosnik, Benjamin De Kosnik, Veronica Jackson, Matthew Jamison, and Jaclyn Zhou.

Included below are work-in-progress graphic outputs from an experimental intersectionality tagging and visualization system being developed by MMRL for film, television, streaming, web content, and social media.

More information is available in the MMRL repository.

DPP

Concrete, moss, oil and acrylic varnish, gitter, silicon beads, inkjet on film, adhesive, glass vials, cannabis seeds from Amsterdam, Netherlands and Humbolt, California.

2020

Form for the long-term preservaton of genetic material: a personal seed vault for rare/legendary/unknown or otherwise meaningful genetics, a miniature Svalbard for a single plant.

Playing With Fire*

Inkjet on washi, folds, PVA adhesive, titanium-zinc white oil paint stick, mylar tape, washi tape, glitter, handwritten notes in graphite.

Playing With Fire* (Peer-Centered Network Map), double-sided inkjet and foldable. Dimensions 22H x 68W inches, unfolded. Edition of 5.

Upside-down At Any Angle (Peer-Centered Network Map), single-sided inkjet triptych of 31 x 22 inch panels. Dimensions 66H x 31W inches.

2019, 2020

Internet maps composed of three components: sixteen months of the locations of people that share gun files on the internet (black circles), the infrastructure of high speed optical fiber from submarine cables (yellow lines), and network bridges / exit nodes on the Tor network that link the internet to the dark web (red rays). The sampled data, the infrastructure data, and the dark web data are rendered onto the globe with a Cahill-Keyes projection.

On September 1, 2018, the United States Department of State banned Defense Distributed, a company in Texas, from the distributing files for the first 3D printed gun, the Liberator. These files immediately re-appeared on the dark web, on private download sites, attached as messages sent on phones, on peer-to-peer networks, and other networks all over the world. Since then, schematics for additional weapons have circulated, including AR-15, AK-47, Glock 17, and accessories such as large capacity magazines and bump fire gadgets. On the day of the ban, computers using custom software started sampling the internet to collect any data on users sharing these files, sampling peer-to-peer traffic to construct a sixteen-month history of network locations. The sampling effort, and the attempts to visualize this flow of virtual weaponry, continue into the present.

Mark Lombardi, Nugan Hand Bank Sydney Australia (Version 2)
Louise Drulhe, The Critical Atlas of the Internet

Alpha60 Archival Forms

a60-3-end a60-1-open a60-0-summer-stack

Installation, variable size. With six 8.5 x 11″ bound objects (100-600 pages), a combination of maps on washi (22 x 17″), and 1080p video (1-4 minutes).

2017, 2018, 2019, ongoing

An installation of artifacts from a research project exploring internet piracy as an instantiation of Nam June Paik’s Video Common Market. Due to the numerous technical and legal obstacles in studying peer to peer sharing behavior, the experimental data is anonymized and then materialized in archival art forms. These objects encapsulate the ephemeral nature of BitTorrent phenomena on the internet, guarding the privacy of individual internet users while providing media and communication scholars with accurate records of television circulation on the internet.

Alpha60
Nam June Paik Timeline
Alpha60 3D-Gun Files One Year (pdf)
Alpha60 Detective Chinatown 3 First 15 Weeks (pdf)

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Art Republishing Conundrum

Two archive images from Maria Porge’s article in American Craft, May 2007. A Whole Life: The Art (and Craft) of Ruth Asawa. The image on the left is a representation of the page as published. The image on the right is a representation of the original page with only the author text remaining.

How to think outside the cage that has grown up around art writing? Established art writers find it extremely difficult to find and make public past art writing. On-line archives for art magazines are more often than not missing , locked behind a paywall, and of poor quality. Subscriber archives at venerable publishers such as Art Forum consist of select articles since 2000, in the form of grainy screenshots of articles, often compressing both text and image into black and white jpegs of size 540 x 400. This tiny amount of information is equivalent to reading an Art Forum article on a 1980’s television, with 20% of the screen blocked by a potted plant.

At the same time, galleries like Hauser Worth list archives of press for artists. Is there a way to level the playing field for the authors of the original article?

Reprinting past work within the current publishing and legal climate is especially difficult. Reprinting is especially tricky for art writing, due to an excessive combination of out-of-print art publications, a forking trail of long-dead publishers, haphazard archives, lost or vague contracts, and wishful-to-woeful adjudication of republishing rights. In addition, clearing image rights with any artists (or other rights holder) under discussion is also required, and perhaps the image-maker or recorder as well. The complexity quickly becomes overwhelming, contributing to art history’s glacial pace at online organization and digitization?

An alternative that many art writers employ is to scan the print article and put links to the PDF’s. Depending on the publishing contract, authors may have explicit rights to do this. Some publishers put free versions of their publication or specific articles on their own websites, suitable for re-linking by authors. Several writers do full bibliographies with links to available PDF files.

What is best practice? What is legal? What is common? Could higher-resolution files for Art Forum be hosted at the internet archive?

How does this fit into the author/writer/artist identity elsewhere on the web? Is it linking to an academic or organizational affiliation? Or to academia.edu? Is it this linking to an amazon.com author page? Is it linking to the art writer’s canonical home page?

Is there another way? Is there a way to explicitly manufacture a transformation such that the new media archive’s existence has legal standing? Can transformative works be used to republish and protect fair uses for any of three purposes: preservation, a full-text search engine, and electronic access for disabled patrons who could not read the print versions?

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Eleven Electronic Media Questions for Artists

Q1. How do you like to communicate? Rank everything from voice phone call, texting, email, in person, etc. Top five only.

Q2. How do you search for art on the internet? What do you find?

Q3. What is your oldest digital file? How do you store it?

Q4. What is your oldest extant artwork? Where is it? How is it stored or displayed?

Q5. Do you have an art documentation system, and if so, what? Have you seen other art documentation systems that you liked? Do you remember how you made work ten years ago?

Q6. Search for yourself. Google, Facebook, etc. What do you see? Do you see anything missing?

Q7. Where is your oldest digital self hidden?

Q8. Do you have any media policies? If yes, detail. A media policy is an action or protocol that you put in place that regulates media. For instance, not having a Facebook account is a media policy. Only watching two hours of television a night is a media policy. Figuring out when to post on Instagram (Instagram Prime Time) is a media policy. Etc, etc.

Q9. List all current media and social media accounts accessed via the internet. Specify two or three favorites. Do you have any aliases, and if so, detail to your desired comfort level. Have you ever had an on-line account suspended or deactivated, if so, detail as above. Do you archive social media history, track meta-data, and if so detail.

Q10. Is your public representation a result of a deliberate strategy or strategies on your part, or is this just internet magic? Discuss. Do you own FIRSTNAME.LASTNAME? FIRSTNAMELASTNAME.com? OTHER.com?

Q11. What simple things do you do that are likely to work in the future? Especially for areas like password managers, image file formats, archival data, on-line, etc?

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Something great from the New Yorker: The GNU Manifesto turns 30 by Maria Bustillos. Previously as Dream Freely. See Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Best practices for conservation of media art from an artists perspective for art best practices. Lynda Schmitz Fuhrig at the Smithsonian Institution Archives, in Preserving Your Treasures.

Equal Weight Uhuras

Two to six channel video art installation. Two to six 34 inch LED televisions, wall-mounted adjacent to each other in landscape orientation, synchronized 19:44 minute 1080p loops.

2015

Samples six characters from two seasons of Star Trek episodes, and re-constructs two seasons in a condensed form, where all the characters have the same amount of “screen time” as the character Uhura, with the added proviso that all the characters are shown talking equally to each other in a random fashion, or conversing alone with a representation of space.