Pockets Full of Memories

The state of the digital humanities

“…Hayles, 2011; partly a response to Lev Manovich’s well-known, controversial declaration that the two are ‘natural enemies’ (Manovich, 2001: 225)), and George Legrady’s and other new media artist’s imagination of databases as media forms (e.g. Legrady, 2001, 2007a, 2007b).…”

“…After starting with CD-based works, new media artists quickly scaled up to the paradigm of the database and the network, making databases and the Internet not just their platforms but part of the core idea of their work. An instance of what Vesna (2007) has called ‘database aesthetics’, for example, is George Legrady’s Pockets Full of Memories art installation (Legrady, 2001), which at its premiere at the Centre Pompidou in Paris required visitors to scan in items from their pockets and fill out an accompanying questionnaire about the objects’ attributes. The computers driving the installation then processed the initial assemblage of over 3,000 objects through a self-organizing map (SOM) algorithm and projected the results in a ‘wall of images’ that clustered the objects in both predictable and surprising ways.…”

“…The computers driving the installation then processed the initial assemblage of over 3,000 objects through a self-organizing map (SOM) algorithm and projected the results in a ‘wall of images’ that clustered the objects in both predictable and surprising ways. Notably, Legrady saw the end result of the project (like that of many of his later projects) to be not just a visual display but an exploration of the structure of the underlying database and data (Legrady, 2007a, 2007b; Simanowski, 2005). So, too, Lisa Jevbratt’s well-known art project 1:1 , which ran first in 1999 and then again in 2001–2 (Jevbratt, 2001–2), systematically crawled the Web to create ‘a database that would eventually contain the addresses of every Web site in the world and interfaces through which to view and use the database’.…”