Industrial landscapes of the future/past: DataisNature and the work of Paul Prudence.
By Mark Hancock.
Mark Hancock reviews the research blog DataIsNature (http://www.dataisnature.com/) and its curator Paul Prudence, whose work captures the landscapes of post-industrial places and filters them through the clean/modern frameworks of contemporary media arts practices to produce some exhilerating and fascinating live performance cinema.
"Algorithms only really come alive in the temporal time-frames that they move through. Their existence depends on being able to move freely along time's arrow, unfolding and expanding out in to the universe, or reversing themselves backwards into a finite point. Every form and structure that the universe creates is the result of a single step along that pathway and we're only ever observing it at a single moment. Those geological steps can take millions of years to unfold and we can only ever really look back and see the steps that happened before we chose to observe them. Computational algorithms break down that slow dripping of nature's possibilities and allow us to become time-travellers, stepping into any point that we choose to." (Hancock 2012)