[ISEA2009] Paper: Jefferson Goolsby & Mei-ling Lee – The global data palette: massive databases and the reformation of content creation in film/video and music/sound art practice

Abstract

The global data palette                                                                                                                              For film/video and music/sound arts practice there is an emergent production reformation that represents a significant shift away from the intrinsic and fundamental restrictions of twentieth century models of time-based image and sound composition. After 100 years of incremental advancement, current moving image and sound production developments offer a radical shift not only in production technologies but also distribution and delivery systems, and what may prove most significant – aesthetic values and paradigms. Not only how we create, but how we acquire, own, store, and engage with visual and sonic materials is clearly changing. The global data palette proposes that time-based media artists will move away from the resource intensive aspects of content capture and redirect production emphasis to the post-production construction of projects by working primarily with existing content from massive databases. Such a shift places digital media creators in a substantially altered environment of creative practice, and offers greatly changed production, economics, and aesthetic engagements previously unavailable. Several technological developments have initiated this reform, particularly access to means of production (cameras, computers, etc.) and access to means of distribution (the Internet). As access to means of production and distribution becomes ubiquitous, three emerging developments function as a critical subset in the transformation of production practices. These subset changes are:

  1. the affordability of massive data storage;
  2. the restructuring of data ownership; and
  3. the malleability of data.

Through these three developments in storage, ownership, and malleability, a fundamentally changed production model may be decisively enabled.

  • Jefferson Goolsby & Dr Mei-ling Lee University of Maine, Orono, USA

Full text (PDF)  p. 834-840