harwood on Mon, 5 Mar 2012 05:03:06 +0100 (CET) |
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<nettime> Invisible Airs Documentary |
Alistair Oldham an old film maker friend of mine has just just uploaded the "Invisible Airs" documentary. This is Alistairâs particular take on databases and the events that surrounded our work in Bristol. As database's become active mediator's in their own right, actors constructing, organising and modifying social relations and I'm often in a position of addressing new publicâs, outside of specialist knowledge and trying to explain the complex machinery that's behind the lived logics of databases. Alistairâs film will be a key tool with which we will try to generate discussion. http://yoha.co.uk/ia_documentary Invisible Airs â Documentary by Alistair Oldham "The computerized database is fundamentally changing society. From communication, to government, transport, shopping, friendship, health, education, narrative and even the way we watch film, the database is radically transforming our lives. And yet we are only barely aware of its existence, we don't really know what a database is : like electricity, it's pervasive and all around us , but we cannot actually see it. Digital media artists YOHA set about making the database visible. Working with Bristol City Council in England, they use local government expenditure to explore the relationship between the database, power and expenditure. Turning the pounds sterling of expenditure into the pounds per square inch of pneumatic pressure, they make a suite of engineered mechanical contraptions: an expenditure filled potato cannon, an Older People Pneumatic Floor Polisher, an Expenditure Riding Machine and a Open Data Book Stabber. But as they tour these contraptions around Bristol, they become embroiled in the more fleshy realities of the city, in the form of the Royal Wedding, local anti-Tesco riots and the censorship of a local outdoor cinema. Invisible Airs is very much a story of our time, of our obsessions with data, ordering and sorting and its uneasy relationship to the visceral bodies bound in cities." Alistair Oldham <Alistair.Oldham@uwe.ac.uk> http://vimeo.com/36567631 http://vimeo.com/acaciafilms # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org