User:BlackHoleEd/sandbox

Transmutations in Software Art

From the 80s software art gained popularity for the advent of the personal computer gave the artist greater control over their work. At this time we see an injunction of transmutability within software art. Basically a glorified way of assessing how software is used to express data. Transmutations are really about enabling the artist to express the data in a way it can be understood and perceived as well as experienced by the audience. In a way transmutations go hand in hand with data visualisations except when consider transmutability often the artistry is hidden. A primary example is the work Sensity by a British collective called Stanza working primarily in net art, data sculpture and networked spaces. On a side note its interesting to concern their appreciation of the style they work it for it highlights that software art is so dynamic now that their are sub categories within this field of art making. Their work aims to create a interactive, data sculpture of a city based on data collected from wireless monitors throughout various cities. In a way the data space becomes the experience for the audience. Sensity does not explicitly expose this motivation unless you read what is happening. If we take the quote from their artist statement

“we represent the movement of people, pollution in the air, the vibrations and sounds of the buildings”

we see a fundamental shift in software art. Stanza have manifested objective data into subjective material and this is pivotal to an understanding of transmutations. The complexity of data is taking something as impersonal as numbers and figures and giving it an emotional capacity. Stanza in a way have given as much sense to a city as they have data.