Hi, I am michael schneider and this is my class entitled "Sculpting With Data' in which, with the help of our teacher, we explore the ideas of dealing with data in this computer age. Along with the WWW comes the incredible amount of information and data which everyone on the web unreservedly spews forth (similar to this journal, each word of which will be almost instantly available to anyone on the web). Along with this data also comes the ability to quickly analyze and organize the data using computer technology instead of our eyes and brains. This ability to parse through data is easily seen in search engines like google.com or yahoo.com. Certain engines such as the Amazon.com database keep track of everything each user buys and even has good suggestions as to what else we might be interested in. Perhaps in the future computers will keep track of what people around the world do and the organize our friendships and interactions accordingly.
Artist, too, have the ability to put this sorting and organizing power to work for them; collecting data and using it in real time (or close to real-time) to create an expression of what is going on. Science has always been an art of creating a proxy: "this graph represents the amount of a certain enzyme present during such and such reaction". Science acts to create a representation of "reality" which we can logically understand. Art similarly works to create a representation, though instead of being a proxy it is more similar to a portrait, something which is still representing something else, be it an emotion, a person experience or an emotional experience of the movement of that enzyme during that reaction. Anyhows science and art are similar in being different forms of representation.
These things are so desperately in need of being represented, scientists and artists devote their entire lives pursuing this, searching for something to connect our different experiences in a way which is understandable and arguably appealing to us. This has always representation has always been done through some technology, weather it is burning sticks and painting the walls of your caves or making gold out of coal. Today we have this technology which gives us the power to take the seemingly endless data that is out there and analyze it, craft it, squeeze bend and sculpt it to create a representation of what it is or to create a system which lets it do its own crafting and sculpting while we sit back and discover what is out there.