An article about artist, Jonathan Harris in Metropolis: If you believe that the Internet is a cultural revolution on the level of modern capitalism, the nuclear age, or even the age of reason, then think of Harris as struggling to create its Impressionism, its Abstract Expressionism, or its neoclassicism—struggling, in other words, to develop a new artistic language for a new human condition. And undoubtedly for a new generation. At 27 Harris is different from those of us even just a few years older who made it through high school without e-mail, college without IMs, and at least a few years of our twenties without blogs. The material of experience has changed. The old rituals of memory—photographs, scrapbooks, diaries, letters—have moved onto the Web, opening them up for a new kind of analysis. “The goal for me is really to hold up a mirror to the world, and then open that mirror up to the larg­est number of people possible,” he says…

Yet it’s not clear the Web can do all this—that it can be a mirror of reality. Not yet at least. Its contents remain uneven and incomplete; not ev­erything in the world exists online. But pointing that out—which you’d think would be obvious—I wor­ry that I’m not grasping what has become self-evident to every 17-year-old: the Web isn’t a thing unto itself but a whole new reality, awaiting its proper representation.

There’s a short story by Jorge Luis Borges that anyone who obsesses over maps will know: “On Exactitude in Science.” It imagines an empire so obsessed with cartography that it made a map of the empire on the same scale as the empire. “The vast map”—of course—“was useless.” It’s a cautionary tale on the limits of representation and, I’ve always thought, an affirmation of the beauty of reality. But what if that caution doesn’t hold in the digital world—where no relations are fixed and scale is not itself a limiting factor (70 million blogs, 20,000 feelings…)? If that’s the case, then the act of representation, of information design, is forever changed. I put the question to Har­ris. “Trying to depict everything is a fool’s game, and ultimately not that interesting—because it’s just as confusing and complicated as life. So then the task becomes limiting your scope, and within a limited scope providing amazing complexity and depth. That’s this process of ‘lens making’: coming up with a lens that you can point at all of reality but that only lets through certain things. That process is digital storytelling. It’s a process of exclusion—not a process of mimicry.”

Thursday, June 28th, 2007