In 2001, C5 initiated a series of projects involving mapping, navigation and search of the landscape using GIS (Geographic Information Systems). The projects are designed to take place over five years and are an extension of C5's exploration into data visualization systems as art. The Landscape Initiative examines the changing conception of the landscape as we move from the aesthetics of representation to those of information visualization and interface.
The C5 Landscape Initiative, debuted at San Francisco Camerawork in May, 2005. During the initial three year development timeframe of the Landscape Initiative, expeditions were undertaken across the globe; as C5 summited Mt. Shasta and Mt. Fuji (Analogous Landscape), traveled the length of the Great Wall of China (Other Path), and undertook a 13,000 mile motorcycle journey around the continental United States collecting GIS data (Perfect View). In conjunction with the SF Camerawork exhibition, The C5 GPS Media Player, was featured on the Whitney Museum’s Net art portal: Artport, for June/July, 2005 - http://artport.whitney.org/
The C5 Landscape Initiative Field Mediation text consists of 5 texts by C5 members which all relate to C5’s explorations of the landscape through the lens of GIS and locative media. The field mediation took place on April 9, 2005 during fieldwork related to the Other Path, a Landscape Initiative project. Field mediation location: UTM 10 552990E 4559010N (in the vicinity of Castle Crags State Park, CA). The five texts are:Dimensionality in Locative Media
By Matt Mays
How does a path act as a self-similar fractal? How does Google Maps illustrate Virilio's concept of the Accident of the Present? This paper explores multi-dimensionality in the data and actual landscape of locative media.
Notes on Semantic Segmentation: Short Path/Long Path
By Joel Slayton
An analysis, framed within the context of linguistics and semantic segmentation, of the relationship between short paths and long paths in spatial navigation.
There is No Non-Site
By Brett Stalbaum
There is no Non-Site in the sense that it effaces its input data; the Non-Site (after Robert Smithson) was always an informational configuration that pointed to something about the real, even if it was not the "dedifferentiated" experience of site that so interested Smithson. But that the real still exists (and is presently mediated by data) implies artistic practices that wrestle with the indeterminate states between data/information and the experience of the landscape these might yield.The Paradox of Indeterminacy in the Age of Reason
By Jack Toolin
A consideration of sublimity and its relationship to technology through
reflection on Enlightenment philosophers such as Edmund Burke.
Prepared Chance: Data Driven Landscape Exploration
By Geri Wittig
With expanding data production generated by the increased use of GIS technologies, an emergent network of big data sets related to the landscape are proliferating and the challenge of big data analysis is on the rise. Big data generation with the goal of finding meaningful data signals in the chaos through relational processing has a long tradition in the C5 approach to discovery. This paper speculates that Pasteur’s famous quote: “Chance prepares the favored mind”, could be inverted to “the mind favors prepared chance” as evidenced in strategies of heuristic data analysis.
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Bio:
C5 Corporation specializes in cultural production informed by the blurred boundaries of research, art and business practice. Focus is on the development of tactical strategies involving information visualization, databases and distributed networks.
C5 projects have been featured at institutions such as The Tate Modern, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Walker Art Center, Center for Creative Inquiry at ASU, and the Cantor Center for the Arts. C5 representatives have participated in international symposia and festivals including Transmediale-Berlin, Ars Electronica-Austria, AUT-New Zealand, SIGGRAPH-Orlando and the II Biennial in Buenos-Aires.
Previous projects include Radio Controlled Surveillance Probes RCSP, 16 Sessions, YDSTYDS (You Don’t See That You Don’t See), 1:1 and SoftSub. Full documentation is available at www.c5corp.com.
C5 is:
Steve Durie
Bruce Gardner
Amul Goswamy
Matt Mays
Joel Slayton
Brett Stalbaum
Jack Toolin
Geri WittigDimensionality in Locative Media
Matt Mays E5 – The Other Path
“A good traveler has no fixed plans
And is not intent upon arriving.”
- Lao-Tzu[1]
The physical observable world is dominated by the three dimensions of Euclidian space (En) and the fourth dimension of time. The modeled mathematical world where data exists, however, is capable of many more dimensions. With Geographical Information Systems, or GIS, additional mathematical dimensions are derived from the physical. This provides a unique environment for exploration of the feedback loop between civilization and nature. The C5 Landscape Initiative lives in the relationship between landscape data and the landscape which it represents.

Figure One: Other Path, installation view San Francisco Camerawork, 2005
The goal of C5’s Other Path[2] project within the Landscape Initiative is to discover algorithms for divining similar paths amongst distributed landscapes. An initial trial involved finding the twin other of the Great Wall of China. Identifying this Great Wall of California consisted of locating the Other Terrain, in other words the areas most likely to contain the Other Path. By using the standard deviation of elevation as the statistical central tendency, C5 was able to narrow down the likely candidates for exploration. Virtual hikers were then modeled and executed to locate various agencies of the Other Path.
The SlopeReduction virtual hiker, for instance, seeks paths between the start and end points that contain, on average, the least slope. As part of the April.09.05 field mediation, C5 executed these paths in the field.
Deviations from this path generated additional information and furthered the procession. “Deterministic control simply does not work when there is variability in the terrain.”[3] Additional field mediations and virtual hiker cycles will be needed to iteratively evolve the conceptual and perceived integrity of the Other Path system. The spirit of the Landscape Initiative remains empirical.
Much like a coastline, ridge or other boundary, the path also displays fractal self-similarity. When viewed from any level the path will demonstrate a similar wandering pattern. When traversing the mountains of China, the Great Wall wanders in large sweeping curves. The Wall wanders further within these larger curves, and the hiker wanders within the Wall. Much like the fractal, the virtual hikers of The Other Path synthesize the predictions of deterministic computation and opportunistic nature. The meander of nature contains more information than the straight and deterministic path. “A raindrop’s path down a mountain is very difficult to describe.”[4] Traversing the Other Path does not yield a straight line, and while walking down the path we can turn left or right if the virtual and actual path affords it. Accepting or resisting the path generates information.
Any path is the intersection of geological time and the time frame of the flaneur. Erosion and uplift modify the landscape over time and add the dimension of the geological time frame to the dialogue between the earth and the machine. This blossoming dimensionality is fundamental to data mining the virtual. In the case of the C5 Landscape Initiative, these data dimensions are derived from the observable physical dimensions. Each new derived data axis results in a new theoretical dimension in the big data landscape.
Granularity, the fundamental design issue of mining big data[5], is an important consideration when analyzing a path. The Great Wall of California could exist on a rock or a blade of grass unless a 1:1 scale is maintained in both space and time. As in Zeno’s paradox of the arrow[6], increasing the time granularity of the path reduces the persistence of time-vision to the point where the traveler is at rest. The same could be said for the next point and the next as movement for the traveler becomes paradoxically impossible. Much as the GPS system utilizes the synchronized division of time through the atomic clock to escape the arrow paradox, the C5 Landscape Initiative requires ongoing empirical performance to animate the frozen hiker.
Google Maps, C5 and Fractal Optics

Figure Three. E2.09. Image by Alan Taylor.[7]
Richard Long walked peacefully towards the sublime. The geo-video-blogging neo-flanuer lunges for it with rabid ferocity, leaving behind only a Borges Map of metadata. In response to this demand, services such as Google Maps, Google Earth and the C5 GPS Media Player[8] offer an expanding platform for GIS exploration by the consumer masses. The Google Maps service offers an open API to a growing repository of mapping and satellite imagery data.[9] Hundreds of independent projects, often called mash-ups, combine the Google Maps API with other web services to create new applications.[10] As with any map, Google Maps data is dimensionally compressed using a projection method to display three-dimensional landscape data in two dimensions. The recent addition of satellite imagery to Google Maps, along with Google Earth’s ability to add topological data and render in three dimensions, begins to twist this second dimensional map back into a fractal dimension in between.
In The User Illusion, Tor Norretranders discusses fractal dimensions:
For example, a coastline might have a dimension of 1.23. This means that though it may be a line of infinite length, it twists so much that it fills some of the plane. A line with a fractal dimension of 1.98 is so twisted that it fills almost the entire plane; while a line with a dimension of 1.02 is very close to being a straight line. [11]
As more paths are mapped using the Google Maps API, the paths begin to fill the plane and the fractal dimension between the second and third develops. With the addition of the Google Maps open API and the web services client/server model, the ability to add multiple data dimensions to the landscape’s representation is unlimited. My path becomes your path, which becomes our paths. The blossoming dimensionality of geocoding eventually touches all and the map matches the terrain.

Figure Two: The C5 GPS Media Player
The C5 GPS Media Player and the C5 Landscape Database seek to augment this expanding data terrain by hosting a data warehouse of paths. Currently used as an internal C5 tool for big data exploration, users of the Media Player can revisit their media by “playing” their paths and viewing the media in the same spatial-temporal context as their actual experience. In the C5 Landscape Database, the GPS track point represents the central fact, and n dimensions branch off that central fact. These dimensions can include project names, paths (virtual and actual), persons and media.
The growing availability of consumer-accessible GIS tools allows data mining as telesurvellience to become commonplace. Military use of real-time satellite data portends the looming terminus of this trend. As Virilio states in his geo-dromological tract, Open Sky:
All this has come about because the once unique source of ‘light’, and so of ‘reality’, of bygone days has itself been split in two: the (direct) shade of the sun’s rays or of the electric lamp is now complemented by (indirect) ‘shadow areas’ of the lack of emission of electronic signals, telesurveillance suddenly springing up and supplanting the illumination of things, the ordinary observer’s seeing with his own eyes.[12]
The light of “reality” has come full circle to the light of the emission of electronic signals. The data of the landscape illuminates itself as a target achieving recursive self-destruction, and the in-car navigation system leads to a militarized commute disconnected from its local context. Knowing where you are does not mean you are not lost. Notes
[1] Lao-Tsu, Tao Te Ching, Trans. Steven Mitchell. (New York: HyperCollins, 2000), p. 27.
[2] Additional information on the Other Path project can be found on the C5 web site at http://www.c5corp.com/projects/otherpath/index.shtml.
[3] Poppendeick, Mary and Tom, Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit for Software Development Managers, (Boston: Addison-Wesley, 2003) , p. 26.
[4] Tor Norretranders, The User Illusion. (New York: Penguin, 1991), p. 383.
[5] Inmon, W.H. Buiding the Data Warehouse. (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2002). p. 43.
[6] “Finally, in the arrow paradox, we imagine an arrow in flight. At every moment in time, the arrow is located at a specific position. If the moment is just a single instant, then the arrow does not have time to move and is at rest during that instant. Now, during the following instances, it then must also be at rest for the same reason. The arrow is always at rest and cannot move: motion is impossible.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno's_paradoxes#The_arrow_paradox
[7] http://www.flickr.com/photos/kokogiak/8648226/
[8] http://www.c5corp.com/projects/gpsmediaplayer/index.shtml
[9] http://maps.google.com and http://earth.google.com
[10] O’Reilly’s Radar frequently posts the latest Google Maps mash-ups. See http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/07/where_20_latest.html for the latest examples.
[11] The User Illusion, p. 390.

[12] Virilio, Paul. Open Sky. (London: Verso, 1997), p. 44.

Notes on Semantic Segmentation: Short path/Long path
Joel SlaytonThe notion of a ‘short path’ is a useful theoretical construct related to network theory and computation. Short paths are used in neural net programming for optimization of decision making in the processing of big data and provide for a description of decision trees that enable convergence (embedded relational) by gradually reducing the size of corrections needed. Long paths don’t work for this process, but rather serve primarily to establish context through which heuristic operations are performed. Long path strategy does not provide for accurate information although it may provide a purpose. Long path is the horizon, short path embeds the mechanisms of directed decision making.
Short path/long path frameworks are useful constructs that can be used to frame the terms of interactions between member/nodes of a big data system (network/database). Decision trees are often evidenced in the form of social networks which can best be described in terms of how clusters within the network are connected and thus allow for certain kinds of transmission and association of information to occur. The social network within an information network or large database is formalized at the algorithmic level. Some theorists use the “short path” to describe motifs of networks like the web, the internet, but also relationships among friends and acquaintances, transportation grids, connections among neurons and the interactions among genes where formalization of decision trees is apparent in the social interactions of human beings. Identifying and examining the motifs of short paths can help explain how networks function by breaking up the social network into building blocks.
If mechanisms of short paths/long paths are of interest in terms of the data landscape, we begin by transposing the language of information processing onto the physicality of experience. Traversing the landscape is about spatial orientation and spatial orientation is about decision trees.
Traversing the Great Wall Mutianyu Other Path in California Castle Crags.
Field Mediation Notes: This is a short path.[1] Most analogies are.
It is also an inflection. Its semantic nature is that of a compressed functional segment formed of points isolated yet meaningful in relation only to its precedent. The short path is therefore implicit and as a concept it is definite. Compare this notion to the long path, which is virtual and not defined as difference but rather by essence. Procession of a long path is a matter of abstraction, concept and generality, whereas procession relates to the short path as a demonstration shaped by a chain of definitions, concatenations and reciprocal inclusions. Short paths are deterministically prehensive, relating to both neighboring short paths and those of similar characteristic, whereas long paths are products of non-temporal change. The identity of a short path is therefore procedural and like language it operates grammatically capable of inflection of expression.
Deleuze expresses the role of inflection as a geometric signifier helping to clarify our understanding of the nature of path, “Inflection is the event that happens to the line or to the point”. [2] In this seemingly simple statement Deleuze presents us with the complications of inflection. Implied is the inclusionary/exclusionary nature of a semantic geometry structured as an event, which situates a point among points, a line among lines, or segment among segments. Stated this way Deleuze’s observation alludes not only to a linguistic function of the point/line as prehensive event (an event based on predication and analogy) but also to the scale (embeddedness) that situates the geometric event. It is in this sense we can speculate that inflection must force the emergence of a definition as a precession of relations among points/lines…..the short path.
To be clear this precession of relations is not the point/line sequence itself, but rather its definition. Deleuze explains, “Inclusion is the predication that places inflection in the concept of the line or point, that is, in THE OTHER point that we will call metaphysical.” Stated more simply every point/line has a concept, a formulation or signature of being that can be substituted for the identity of the defined (the real). The concept is not the thing.
In the midst of real definitions, we continually seek something definite. Where are we? How do I get there from here? Inevitably, the answer lies in a precession of relations that provides an acceptable definition to the problem at hand. Determining what leads to what is the demeanor of the short path, every point/line is an analogy of not only the previous point/line, but all segments of which it is a class. As a segment the short path is like a paragraph in a great run on sentence. Go here, go there, go around that, go back, move, stop, start, faster, slower. Similar to a Turing machine this embedded potential behavior of the path and its potential for scaling of the event exists within a universal formal system of inflections, what we might call the path grammar.
The short path is situated within the non-temporal moment of analogy. To get there from here is not a matter of direction but rather the inference of similarity, memory and discovery. Every short path is an other path and every other path is a set of directions. Notes
[1] Reference to C5 Landscape Initiative: The Other Path. http://www.c5corp.com/
[2] The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque by Gilles Deleuze, University of Minnesota Press 1993.

There is no Non-Site
Brett StalbaumRobert Smithson is publicly best known for his monumental, conceptual, and simultaneously minimalist land art works such as Partially Buried Wood Shed (1970), Spiral Jetty (1970), and Amarillo Ramp (1973). Earlier however, Smithson implemented his influential series of Non-Sites works whose resonance in the art world continues today on an equal par with his monumental land art works. Writing on Smithson's Non-Sites, Nick Kaye explains the foundation of these works in terms of the Non-Site's negation of the original landscape:
[I]n its designation of a location's specific properties, its limits and its boundaries, the Non-Site effects precisely the kind of imposition in whose suspension Smithson supposes the site is experienced. Even in so far as the Non-Site casts the very idea of a work over a specific site, then it threatens to efface precisely that unbounded state that Smithson seeks to map. Here, in fact, the Non-Site reproduces the gallery's contradictory attempt to recollect, and so limit, the 'dedifferentiated' site. Thus, where the experience of the site is one of a limitlessness, the Non-Site establishes itself as a limiting mechanism, a differentiation, whose effect is not so much to expose the site as to erase it. Smithson observes that '[t]he site has no seeming limits, but the Non-Site points to the site. In a sense, the Non-Site, although it points to it, effaces this particular region.'[1]
For Smithson the "unbounded state" of the "dedifferentiated site", and the "limitlessness" of the site refers specifically to an experience of place. This mode of experience bears an important relationship to the sublime and the separate concept of beauty. In fact, it is precisely this distinction between the sublime and the beautiful which today maps to the distinction between data and information. Via these concepts, I argue that representation does not efface or (in later postmodern terms 'replace'), the real site. A contemporary view would have it that representation is just one mediating layer in a larger informational ontology as system. The matters of sublime/beautiful, dedifferentiated/differentiated, and data/information are all respectively bound. Herein lies the immense potential to expand understanding of the world at a time when we are tempted to assume that aesthetic practices are no longer useful in revealing knowledge about the landscape and our experience in it.
Data as representational form
The major change brought about by humankind's recent monumental accomplishment - that being the wrapping of the globe in wire and electromagnetic carriers for communications - is not so much the invention of data or its processing into information (these are ancient inventions), but rather the speed and ease at which these representational forms are transmitted, used, automated, computed and ultimately stitched into the fabric of both culture and the material world. Critically, data increasingly entails the actual, playing an active role in the unfolding of what happens through virtual systems of surveillance, panopticonism, marketing, command and control. Strangely to artists, much of the representational technology that now fully impinges on our actual and lived experience is not technology of visible representation. Representation today exists in a complex of database, data processing, and communication that happens in real time, distributing the real in its wake. The use of data representation (a.k.a. database, entity-relationship modeling, object-oriented systems design) expresses more social power today than visible artistic or media representations, as in painting, film, television, digital imaging, or possibly even user interface. These latter forms are increasingly like the ripples on the surface generated by a more powerful representational activity (distributed data processing) taking place under the surface.
But in the academic world of the humanities, representation is still most often assumed to be a manifest, human consumable expression which is presented for an aesthete, reader, consumer or some such end-audience in a context of appreciation, recreation, work or marketing - whether looking at a painting in a museum, a video game, or a flash animation in a web browser. Generally, related artifacts take the form of visualization (be it painting, data visualization, television), or sonification, computer interaction, and various forms of narrative, as in the example of computer games. All of these forms (different types of user interface) are always present in some way in all art works - so that these surface representations or media experiences should become the primary 'texts' which are studied in the humanities and indulged in by artists is no surprise. But the very fact that the formal definitions of data and information are different from one another implies the existence of another representational regime, one that is less visible and likely more powerful. Exploring the latter (data) in an equally conceived complex of representation with interface (information) is certainly a critical aspect of landscape exploration as artists move forward (I avoid making claims for other areas of practice), because not only do visual representation and interaction impinge on our relationship with place, so do database and datascape, the less visible but active computational regime of representation and culturally embedded sign system.
Moving the horizon of sublime
Beauty is traditionally defined as pleasing, symmetrical, proportional or rhythmic. It is a concern of form and a human capacity to cognize it. Kant describes it as "[T]he cognitive powers brought into play by [the] presentation [of the beautiful object] in free play... Hence the mental state in this presentation must be a feeling, accompanying the given presentation, of a free play of the presentational powers directed to cognition in general... [W]e need imagination... and understanding to provide the unity of the concept combining in the components of the presentation.”[2]
But in the art world after conceptualism, we no longer need to associate the presentation of the beautiful with the concerns of the aesthete, or Kant's proposed universal communicability of beauty. Beauty's definition can now be mapped to the work of presenting cognizable, pedagogical, interpretive, and instructional configurations conveying information; of work whose message, interpretation and the 'voice' of the artist is present, available and intentionally informational. Political or not, such art work has a message or a conclusion that was processed according to the artist's intentions. Data is processed and digested for the audience. It is the art of information, and this is the fundamental assumption of the majority of art practice today, regardless of medium.
The definition of the sublime, however, is somewhat more complicated than that of beauty. During the 20th century, the common use of the term drifted toward the definition of beauty. Most people today use the term "sublime" to mean a kind of hyper-beauty, a more beautiful than beautiful beauty. Kant himself pointed out that indeed, both terms refer to a kind of disinterested, contemplative emotional state. But it is where the meaning of 'the sublime' verges on something like 'inexpressible beauty' that the meaning of the word begins to take a semblance of a more useful definition: a state of mind or perception wherein the viewer is overwhelmed and unable to process the data that they have been exposed to. A beautiful sunset activates the senses, producing a pleasurable experience. A sublime sunset activates the senses in a different manner, one that may be emotionally imbued with anything from the pleasure of awe to abject fear or perhaps even physical suffering! The sublime is not a sensation of clarity of form, understanding, and free play of the imagination. The sublime heightens the sense of the unknown and throws the human cognitive system into a state of uncertainty where "clarity endlessly plunges into obscurity"[3]; a state that humans are nevertheless able to deal with via our inductive and inferential intelligences. This sense of the sublime is a necessary capability for investigation and discovery, because it is expressed in humans on the verge of understanding something too large for their deductive modes of cognition to accommodate. It is inductive and intuitive.[4]
Kant described the difference between the beautiful and the sublime, presenting them in terms of beauty being associated with contemplation of form and quality, and the sublime associated with the contemplation of limitless quantities; so large as to appear formless to our senses:
"The beautiful in nature is a question of the form of object, and this consists in limitation, whereas the sublime is to be found in an object even devoid of form, so far as it immediately involves, or else by its presence provokes a representation of limitlessness, yet with a superadded thought of its totality. Accordingly, the beautiful seems to be regarded as a presentation of an indeterminate concept of understanding, the sublime as a presentation of an indeterminate concept of reason. Hence the delight is in the former case coupled with the representation of quality, but in this case with that of quantity." [5]
Interpretively, we may extract from all of this that the pursuit of information is the pursuit of the beautiful and that the pursuit of data - such as the limitless quantities now being produced by the big data disciplines of the earth sciences, astronomy, and biology - is the pursuit of the sublime. Information, which by definition must be processed from data, shows the symmetry, proportion, and congruity that can be found in a data set. Beauty tells us something with clarity and a certain force, it leads to knowledge. Data, by contrast is the less visible representational form that controls ever more of our existence today; it is large and overwhelming to the human senses, and we are entailed by it. The former implies a resting point for understanding as moments of clarity and truth, the later implies an impulse for exploration and new data collection, an always moving desire to stir things up and create new problems to face. How artists implement their forms of expression between information and data, and the transitory positions between them as they transform in infinite recursion, is the aesthetic issue of our time. Data processed into information raises questions that lead recursively to more data collection and processing. The cycle of the differentiation and dedifferentiation, beauty and sublime, information and data, and even Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of territorialized and deterritorialized, represent a framework in which to engage with data as expansion toward the sublime. Thus there is no Non-Site in the sense that it effaces its input data; the Non-Site was always an informational configuration that pointed to something about the real, even if it was not the "dedifferentiated" experience of site that so interested Smithson. But that the real still exists (and is now mediated by data) implies artistic practices that wrestle with the indeterminate states between data/information and the experience of the landscape these might yield.Notes
[1] Kaye, Nick Site-Specific Art, performance, place and documentation, Routledge, 29th West 35th Street, New York, NY, 10001, 2000. Page 93.
[2] Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment, 1790, widely available in the public domain.
[3] Slayton, Joel and Wittig, Geri, Ontology of Organization as System, Switch - the new media journal of the CADRE digital media laboratory, Fall 1999, Vol. 5, Num. 3, http://switch.sjsu.edu/web/v5n3/F-1.html
[4] "Intuitive" is a troubling term. We refer to it in terms of a unique mode of cognition and association unique to the brains of higher species, not in a magical or mystical sense often implied in certain sub-disciplines of pop-metaphysics.
[5] ibid.

The Paradox of Indeterminacy in the Age of Reason
Jack ToolinWhile landscape imagery appeared in ancient art such as Egyptian tablets and Roman frescoes, and was variously depicted throughout the centuries, it is in the Romantic period that nature became a focal point of curiosity and a genre of its own in Western art. This was at a time when the Western world’s rational faculties had gathered enough momentum to set modernity in motion - with all its aspirations and contradictions. Similarly, our own time has seen quantum leaps in technological capability accompanied by an idealistic embrace of its latent possibilities, and a rejuvenated interest in exploring landscape. For C5, landscape exploration is aided, even inspired, by the current technological developments.
Political, economic, scientific, and technological, restlessness in 18th century Europe was the backdrop to a growing interest in ‘authentic’ experience among intellectuals and artists of the time. For some, the rising industrial prowess and codification of scientific research led to unbridled belief in progress, and society’s potential to operate with the efficiency of a well-oiled machine (hence, Auguste Comte’s positivism). On the other hand, there was general interest in aesthetics, taste, and the sublime – while philosophers contemplated the complexity of consciousness in their somewhat exclusive circles, popular journals also contemplated the issues. This interest in the response to ones environment coincided with growing political and economic independence – keep in mind that the French Revolution and American independence were just around the corner.
One reaction to the increasingly rationalized world of the Enlightenment can be seen in Jean Jacques Rousseau’s break from the philosophes. His belief that so-called civilized life had sacrificed emotion, while popular with the general public, was an affront to his peers, and thus a schism occurred. However, Rousseau was not alone in taking on subjectivity as a serious topic for investigation; out of those who did, Kant and Burke may be the most prominent.
While there has been much reflection on Kant’s Critique of Judgement (including that of my colleague Brett Stalbaum), Burke’s unusual, one might say paradoxical, interpretation of sublime as the result of terror in response to awesome experiences is quizzical, and often overlooked. And yet it has provided an avenue for thinking about art since the rise of the avant garde in the 19th century.
Here is a passage from Burke’s Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, published in 1757:
The passion caused by the great sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul in which all its notions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor in consequence reason on that object.
Burke’s suggestion that experiencing the sublime provokes a sense of horror doesn’t mesh with popularly held ideas about the sublime today. It is important to keep in mind, however, that in this particular passage Burke is referring to experiences in nature itself, and that he didn’t overlook the importance of beauty, but rather emphasized what he felt to be a more profound aspect of existence. In fact, the interest in horror, and what he referred to as ‘terror,’ was just one part of Burke’s sublime equation, and while no less intriguing, it is only the first stage of an experience that could ultimately result in ‘delight.’ ‘Delight,’ according to Burke, is the response provoked by a moderated experience of mortality, as in the experience of viewing say, Goya’s Massacre of May 3rd. One responds to the horror of the event while simultaneously taking relief in the knowledge that they are simply viewing a representation of a tragedy, not experiencing it first hand. Using a somewhat loose interpretation, we can see manifestations of Burke’s sublime not only in paintings like the Raft of the Madusa, but also in Dada theatre, the disorienting tilted sculptures of Richard Serra, Cindy Sherman’s photographs of abject dysfunction, and Eduardo Kak’s genetically manipulated rabbits.
Burke’s ideas are easy to perceive in Romantic landscape imagery. On the other hand, viewing a painting by Kasimir Malevich, a performance by Chris Burden, or a new media piece by Andrea Polli may be more difficult. In his essay The Sublime and the Avant-Garde, Lyotard contemplates Burke’s notion of sublimity with regards to 20th century art. In it he states, “With the advent of the aesthetics of the sublime the stake of art in the 19th and 20th centuries was to be the witness to the fact that there is indeterminacy.” Indeterminacy here refers to the accelerated questioning of, and ensuing experimentation with, the language of art as artists sought to redefine what could be art.
“Sublimity is no longer in art, but in speculation on art.” [1]
The frequency with which artistic conventions were asserted and challenged created an atmosphere of flux. And yet this continual disruption was necessary to maintain a sense of purpose, a sense of becoming, a sense of the now. Contemporary artists working with technology continue to explore the language of art as they adopt not only new technologies, but also methodologies from other disciplines such as science, math, and engineering. Perplexing to a public nurtured on notions of the picturesque and self expression, this work once again confronts viewers with the uneasy feeling of indeterminacy, brought on by levels of magnitude and/or complexity that were previously confined to the lecture hall or laboratory. And yet it is by venturing into new territory, by challenging the limitations of our imaginations, that both the artist and viewer move beyond convention and experience the sublime.Notes
[1] Lyotard, “The Sublime and the Avant-Garde,” in Postmodernism, a Reader, ed. Thomas Docherty (New York, Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 256.

Prepared Chance: Data Driven Landscape Exploration
Geri WittigIn January, 2003, at the initial C5 Landscape Initiative field mediation (UTM 10 589631E 4145735N in the vicinity of Alviso, CA), where some of the seeds were planted for the conceptual framework for the Other Path project, I presented a text concerning landscape data and complex adaptive system Earth. In this text I speculated: “With the increasing use of GIS technologies in a wide variety of fields, including art, the data networks generated will disseminate into the expanding networks of information technology. I speculate these GIS generated data networks have the potential to act as bifurcations and coadaptive systems in relation to the landscape and the overall complex adaptive system earth.”[1] In April, 2005, C5 embarked on the Other Path project’s California fieldwork in search of the Great Wall of California. The California search was directed by data collected from C5 fieldwork that had taken place in the spring of 2004 along the length of the Great Wall in China. In the process of this fieldwork, C5 participated in just that type of data network generation: a data network that has created an incumbent causality and exploration of data driven path generation determined by a remote location and event.
Fields of causality
In his Essays on the Nature of Causality, biologist David Alles, describes the concept of fields of causality that grow from instances of lateral causality that take place in absolute causal time. He defines absolute causal time “as a vector of time that has its origin at the beginning of the universe and extends outward as a single line of linear causality”.[2] Events may happen simultaneously in absolute time, but because of distance, as in a star from the earth, the effects may not causally interact for great periods of time between space-time locations. Similarly differences in the origin of space-time events can have effects at varying times and locations in space-time. Under the assumption that causality is continuous in nature any event produces an expanding field of effects that emanates outward from a single vector of causal time that represents a unique point in space. All events at any given point in space-time create change in the universe. Stephen Hawking writes in a Brief History of Time: “Space and time are now dynamic quantities: when a body moves, or a force acts, it affects the curvature of space and time - and in turn the structure of space-time affects the way in which bodies move and forces act. Space and time not only affect but also are affected by everything that happens in the universe.”[3]
Causal complexity
Due to the increasing number of events that have occurred since the beginning of time, causal complexity continues to increase. With the increase in events, also comes the increase in data and means for collection, storage, etc.: the big data problem and opportunity. Data generation is both a byproduct and instigator of the ongoing events in the universe. The event of the building of the Great Wall of China took place over great gaps in space-time and the search and exploration of the Other Path in California takes place in another remote space-time location. The formation of the two terrain regions in China and California took place over varying geologic space-time ranges, but data collected from the originating path and event created a directive for locating and creating the corresponding event in California. The data creates an abstracted and algorithmically logical link between these two space-time events and will ultimately create some type of change in the complex adaptive system earth and the universe in which it’s contained.
Data driven discovery and scale
In his article Prepared Minds Favor Chance, Michael Schrage writing in the July, 2004 TechnologyReview.com[4] inverted Pasteur’s famous quote: “Chance favors the prepared mind” to describe the new generation of data-driven strategic innovation in varying R&D enterprises, such as the pharmaceutical giant, Merck. Merck’s research neuroscientists had been working on a new compound that blocks a neurotransmitter called “Substance P” that they thought would become an effective treatment for depression – a huge market as has been demonstrated by products such as Prozac. Their gamble proved wrong though, as the substance failed in phase III clinical trials required by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Over the course of the large amounts of time and money spent on tests and trials, researchers outside of Merck noticed that ailing lab ferrets that were ingesting the Substance P blocker vomited much less than expected. Ferret vomit became the leading indicator that the new Merck compound created an unexpected affect on the brain. This new indicator was pursued by Merck and an anti-nausea drug for patients receiving cancer therapy was developed and went to market. Schrage goes on to note that this type of serendipitous result is something that is being cultivated with new data mining strategies by capital-intensive research enterprises like Merck that increasingly construct their scale of data generation and research to ensure these types of ancillary findings. What was once considered chaotic data noise is now seen as an opportunity to find meaningful data signals. The goal is to not merely explore promising associations, but to explore the possible associations of associations: both cultivating chance and exploiting it.
These types of big data generation with the goal of finding meaningful data signals in the chaos through relational processing have a long tradition in the C5 approach to discovery. With C5’s explorations of defining the Other Path, which entail processes derived from taking originating data from remote space-time events and transposing them onto large data sets and ultimately generating corollary space-time events, perhaps the inversion of Pasteur might even be taken to another logical conclusion: the mind favors prepared chance.Notes
[1] Wittig, Geri. Landscape data and complex adaptive system earth: Holism in complexity and network science. http://www.c5corp.com/research/complexsystem.shtml.
[2] Alles, David L. Essays on the Nature of Causality. http://fire.biol.wwu.edu/trent/alles/papersindex.html.
[3] Hawking, Stephen. A Brief History of Time. New York: Bantam Books, 1988.
[4] Schrage, Michael. Prepared Minds Favor Chance. TechnologyReview.com, July/August 2004.