The Dumpster

About the work

This work is a data art named The Dumpster, it can be said as a huge truck where people put all the trash into it. The name co-relates to the piece so well that this interface is actually functioning like a platform to gather all the stories of dumping others or being dumped in romantic relationship. Is a collection point for dumped relationship.

The Dumpster is the first of three commissioned projects that was displayed at Artport and Tate Online in February and March 2006, each one meant to showcase net art as central to the conception of the museum as a networked, virtual institution. It was ironic and provocative to display The Dumpster on the Valentine's Day because of the content of the work but it did. As mentioned, The Dumpster is constructed by the idea of romantic breakup.

The Dumpster is created by 3 elites from different areas 

Golan Levin teaches electronic art in Carnegie Mellon University with wide variety of online, installation and performance media.

Kamal Nigam has business in data mining and machine learning with an emphasis on analyzing text and internet data.

Jonathan Feinberg is working in Collaborative User Experience group at IBM Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

This dynamic group contributes this work in reconstructing the data base and the design of the interface so well.

What is this work exactly about and how does it work? There you go!

This work is an networked art that it requires viewer to access the page through internet. And the source of this work is totally from internet.The Dumpster is also an interactive visualization of teenage breakups. You can see how exactly it works in this video.

over 20,000 entries on the Blog which relates to romantic breakup are extracted and categorized by the age, gender of the blogger, the similarity of the breakups like who dumped who, the emotion seen from the angry language chosen by the blogger, the reason of this abandoned relationship. At least half of the authors of these breakups were American teenagers between the ages of 13 and 19. Approxmately seventy percent of the breakup authors were identified as female, while roughly fifteen percent were identified as male.

'The main portion of the Dumpster interface is devoted to the Breakup Bubbles.' according to the introduction from the site. A constantly changing set of about 200 breakups is represented by bubbles on the interface. Viewer has to choose a particular bubble among these. The Currently Selected Breakup causes the change of the size and color of other bubbles according to the similarity and difference with the current selection. So, the Current Selected Breakup acts as a query into the complete database of 20,000 breakups.Breakups which are more similar to the Current Selection are redder and brighter, and gradually move towards the Current Selection. The size of a Breakup Bubble represents the length of its corresponding text extract, and also the number of descriptive attributes that are known for that breakup.

Special Features of this work

The special features here is not merely talking about the appearance but the idea behind. For instance, the great search engine of constructing an appropriate database, grouping people together from individual and the representation of emotion from the abstraction.

 

The significant part of this work is more than the visual design. The real breakup story from online blog which involves HUGE database is something. The means to obtain the wanted recourse is important. Blog posts were collected by issuing queries to BlogPulse's search engine using words and phrases indicative of breakups. For example, posts containing phrases such as "broke up" or "dumped me" were be considered. The resulting several hundred thousand posts were scored by a machine learning classifier trained to recognize posts about specifically romantic breakups, so that the unwanted breakup will not appear, for example, the posts about rock bands breaking up. Therefore, it is distinguished from the usual search engine like Yahoo! or Google.

This is a work of data art. I have to emphasize it because data itself is 'dead' and is a fact. We have nothing to do with it if we regard it independently. And now, the artists intelligently link the data up together. Thus, data becomes meaningful. It helps forming particular social group with similar feature or in analogous situation, here is the breakups. From individual and personal breakup to a community of romantic pain. The personal experience is no longer individual anymore. For data art, it involves a whole group of people or information with specifically common characteristic.

Furthermore, to represent the abstract emotion in a representational way like here by bubble, color, size, etc is a process of visualization. This intention is quite alike to that in Guernica by Pablo Picasso.

Guernica, Pablo Picasso, 1937

Picasso used the figurative way to portray the devil and agitation of war, though it is more direct and concrete compare with The Dumpster. He said he used bull to represent brutality and darkness. Horse represents the people (1). Also the exaggeratedly distorted posture and angular shape brings the sense of horror, anxiety, fear and dread. In The Dumpster, artists use the size of bubble to show the length of the text; the color is to show how similar the breakups case is. The trace is representing the emotion of the blogger. Though it works in more subtle way, both artist try to visualize the emotion by means of representational shape and form. Therefore, this is a process to reconstruct the abstraction to representation.

Reflection

'It [data art] pulls us away from information, from the well-formed messages that dominate our experience of digital media.’                    Mitchell Whitelaw 

Data art is  to reconstruct the normal pre-existing data to an other level of its meaning. It is no longer the fact emerging on internet. The Dumpster gathers all the individual breakups. Those breakups were just piece of personal experience shared in their own blog that others have no point to influence it and have nothing to do with the data (the source) as the breakup is totally personal. But now, it goes beyond the level of personal experience but a group of people. Like how Agre said,

'we should bring it [data] to life by thinking through all its relationships — both with other data and with the circumstances in the world that it’s supposed to represent’                                                                                 Agre, 1994

This is what exactly The Dumpster doing that it brings 20,000 entries related to 'break up' and 'dump' together to establish a social group of romantic pain. Then, the social group means more than plain breakup but the object for sociological study for example. The gender and age of the blogger are provided in The Dumpster. It has also categorized the emotion, the dumper and person being dumped for viewer. Actually this work is very useful for sociological study.For instance, the thesis can be 'How different gender or age react to issue of 'breakup' among American teenagers'. This is one of the ways that what data art could become.

Bicycle Wheel, Marcel Duchamp, 1951

On the other way, apart from giving a topic for academic use, connecting the data without rational reason, it is for art or it can be claimed as art. Since this work is composed by the pre-existing data, and i call it ready-made, it reminds us of Dadaism, Fluxus in terms of the medium and material used. For Dadaism, it is more about criticizing the idea of 'what is art?'. Like Bicycle Wheel 'made' by Duchamp (because the whole piece was not made by Duchamp, just he chose preexisting material to compose the work we know now.), he put unrelated material together to become a new art which doesn't have to be logical and rational. Thus, if a set of data is linked aimless to academic study or rational purpose, it is pretty much embracing the philosophy of Dadaism of randomness.

Furthermore, as the 'breakup' entries were searched online and chosen to be included in the artwork, it seems it does not involve any copyright problem. The private experience and the published entry is extracted to compose the art which is now public to all viewers on internet. Since the source is found in public which implies that it is not private and open to share, people can appropriate them for own purpose. Data art or networked art has huge source to work with, once the source is public on internet, copyright is not considered unconsciously. Unlike Duchamp, no matter where he found the needed material, he had to ask the owner for permission to take them away or pay for them in the market unless scrap heap.

Shredder

Questoins
What and who contributes to networked art become an art piece?
Take The Dumpster as example, does the design of the interface contribute it to art? or the intention of artists? What they did was to collect the breakups entries and put them in to the website in a better design on the interface. Can this motivation and intention contribute it to be regarded as art?
The second is who is merit to this work? Those who raise the idea, the concept of the work? If the viewers do not interact with the website by initially clicking on the bubble, does this work be totally accomplished? 
Regarding to The Launch Shredder, is the ware itself an art? or the image appeared after converting the URL put by visitor is the artwork?

For networked art, it obscures the authority of the artist in terms of ownership. Viewer's attention is shifted from aesthetic to creativity of the ware.


Reference

Agre, P. ‘Living Data’, Wired 2.11 (November 1994), http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.11/agre.if.html?pg=1&topic=&topic_set.

Manovich, L. ‘The Anti-Sublime Ideal in Data Art’ (2002) http://www.manovich.net/DOCS/data_art.doc.

Thompson, J. 'Pablo Picasso', How to Read a Modern Painting: Lessons From the Modern Masters. NYC, 2006.