Finding our bearings in a mass of data

Ach, who doesn’t wonder from time to time what will remain?  Not just of our individual selves, but rather of what we value, not just of an individual life, but of an entire age with its struggles & beliefs.

Anyone with some interest in (art) history, knows how sheer material contingencies play a crucial role in the survival of cultural artefacts and texts. (1)  The choice of supporting material (stone or organic), a wet or a dry climate, quality of varnish, …  And on the immaterial side – how transient fame can be, how difficult to predict the continued consideration felt for a tradition, or the continued belief in a metaphysically sanctioned message. 

Now, what will still be understood of our digital age, say, 1000 years hence? What posterity will there be for our massive collective,  distributed effort to digitize everything, to put “everything” on line – from fleeting private expressions to commercial banalities  - from a garish dark web to edifying massive online courses,  to scientific networks … 

What will happen with the ever swelling mass of digital data stored on numerous servers? (2) Will all data that haven’t been accessed for some time, at some point be systematically deleted?  (just as even so-called perpetual cemetery plots are finite, if no one renews the lease). Will there be an artificial intelligence able to make sense of the gigantic mass of data? Will “history writing algorithms” assess historical relevance of data based on numbers of views and followers?  So that a make-up video tutorial on YouTube or a contagious 15 sec goofy dance on TikTok will be considered as emblematic for our age?   

In the early days of internet much was made of its encyclopedic scope  - it was compared to a universal library accessible to all, hyperlinking everything  and easily searchable through search machines.  But since no single human is able to digest it all, on the internet the individual mind is  easily outdone by "big data" crunching algorithms. Will artificial intelligence create some sort of new collective mind, a "mind of the hive"?  (Not a coincidence that there’s an AI company called Hivemind).  

How different the 21^st C Internet of everything & everyone is from a library purposefully built by erudite and sensitive individuals.  How different the Internet is from the 20^th C archetypical library: the Warburg Library;  made up of pictures  & books obsessively brought together by an individual reflecting mind,  continuously seeking meaning, establishing affinities & correspondences between historical images.

 “venir en aide à l’historien d’art qui a perdu ses repères dans une masse inerte de données  […] leur donner un sens dans le contexte de l’histoire de la culture […] Warburg n’avait pas de méthode, mais il avait un message » (3)

«  que l’histoire de l’art importe encore non pas en tant qu’accumulation de faits, mais en tant que témoignage des souffrances et des triomphes de l’humanité » (4)

In order to find their bearings in the massively accumulated data, future (art) historians will need the help of algorithms with superior data-digestion capabilities. 

But how could we expect from algorithms to understand the meaning - the aesthetic, moral and emotional meaning -  of the data they crunch?  

How will they be able to convert these big data again into testimonials that at some point in the future might still appeal to organic specimens of humankind?

Artificial Notes

  1) some figures  & thoughts on book production and survival, from “CrossRoads – travelling through the Middle Ages” by Marco Mostert :  

“from the sixth through the eighth century some 67.000  manuscripts were produced in the Latin West […] From the entire eighth century less than 2.000 manuscripts (or fragments) have survived”
 The cost of making books was high so  “the early-medieval manuscripts that have come down to us all represent considered decisions to make a copy of a text or to write a text […] That is why every manuscript book from this period is worth studying."

(picture from Wikipedia page with list of key works of Carolingian illumination) 


2) some figures & thoughts  on 21^st C “content production” : “As of May 2019, more than 500 hours of video were uploaded to YouTube every minute. This equates to approximately 30,000 hours of newly uploaded content per hour” www.statista.com. “More than 95 million photos are uploaded to Instagram every day.” “More than 1 billion videos viewed on TikTok every day”  . 
The trend may be versus more ephemeral social media (such as snapchat, instagram stories)  with eg  programmed deletion of content after it has been viewed – that would help stop the exponential  growth in saved data. 

  3) quoted from the  French translation of Gombrich’s book “Aby Warburg – Une Biographie intellectuelle”.
Translated again into English by an algorithm – which doesn’t understand the meaning of language but is uncannily competent all the same : “to help the art historian who has lost his bearings in an inert mass of data […] give [the data] meaning in the context of the history of culture […]  Warburg had no method, but he had a message “ 

  4) “ that art history still matters not as an accumulation of facts, but as a testimony to the sufferings and triumphs of humanity ”  (also translated by ab algorithm)

of ports and books, and images of escape

Although contemporary ports are a rational economic affair – the imagination is fortunately slow to adapt. Who would not project onto ports, a promise, if not of happiness, then at least of travel & escape? 

My actual naval experience is limited to a train tour (25 years ago on a cheap youth eurorail ticket) of Europe’s port cities. Maritime romance was, alas, in short supply everywhere, but among the visited cities, Hamburg, even though bustling with commerce & industry, did appeal most to the imagination. 

I now read (1) how the busy commercial people of Hamburg came rather late (& reluctantly) to culture & artistic education. And if they did,  it was partly thanks to the  "Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg"  : this wonderful joint venture of the entrepreneurial & dazzlingly wealthy Warburg banker brothers and the eldest, melancholy & nerve wracked,  non-banker brother, Aby Warburg. 

In 1933 the library escaped from the Nazis by boat, via the port of Hamburg.

“He came back from Italy with four thousand books. Seven years later, in 1911, he has fifteen thousand books. 

In 1933, more than sixty thousand books will leave Hamburg for England, aboard of two steamships."

The kind of sentence to keep alive the immemorial lure of ships on the horizon.  

 Notes

1.     « Aby Warburg ou la tentation du regard », by Marie-Anne Lescourret
2.  The link of the text with the photos is admittedly tenuous – one is a picture of the river Scheldt taken from the MAS building in Antwerpen, and the other is a photo (detail) from a Netherlandish painting, taken in Suermondt museum in Aachen.  In fact, there only is some  subjective contemporaneousness, in terms of reading & photographing – both camera & Warburg book accompanied me on my year-end escapist trips.

ghost ships for grown-ups

 Then, as now, I was a naïve art lover.  So the enchantment was immediate:  gazing at those many, amazingly elaborate ships (with billowing sails and look, with canons firing!), at the miniature figures on the pier – dazzled by the panoramic vastness of sea and skies – savouring the sheer luminosity of the oil painting, with those gleaming greenish blueish aquatic hues (1), with the implausible but magic luminosity of the skies.  

Back then, it had been my own personnel pious Rome-voyage and I had been cramming as many Italian art splendours as possible in the space of a modest city trip.  And then, there, in the venerable Doria Pamphilj gallery, I found myself looking at a Bay of Naples painted by an ancient Flemish Italy-traveller.

In these interconnected times, globetrotting has become common, and yet, when an old master’s work travels , this still feels like an event (the insurance company must think so too) .  And yes, it is somehow touching that Bruegel’s Naples painting made it back over the Alps to the North – as proud centrepiece of the exhibit “la Flandre et la Mer” / "Flanders and the Sea" (2)  

The exhibit’s curators have well understood the appeal to the imagination exerted by ships and seascapes throughout the history of art:

  “et la part de rêve qu’ils engendrent” (“and the dreaming they  breed”) - so says the notice introducing the room with the many graphical reproductions of Bruegel’s elaborate  vessels ...  and so says the the look of deep concentration and glee on the visitors’ faces.

   

Sticky notes

1.   What a wise decision of the Doria Pamphilj gallery to feature a black and white photo – none of the many colour photos in Google’s database come even close to rendering these gleaming hues 
2.      Heartfelt thanks go to the Northern French for their loving curating of Flemish art in Cassel’s  Musée de Flandre
3.    In the age of giant containerships, it’s quite touching how attached our imagination remains to images of ancient vessels,  which have lost all utility or relevance.  

So, even in this admittedly frivolous (though poignantly genuine) activity of adults peering at little painted ships, one is tempted to see confirmation of Aby Warburg’s rather more tragic/melancholy definition  of art history as "ghost stories for grown-ups" -  “ une histoire de fantômes pour grandes personnes” .

Hopefully one may be forgiven to link this fascination exerted by little painted ships of a bygone era to the theory of the “survival” or “stickiness”  of images  in art history (cf as evoked by Georges Didi-Huberman discussing Aby Warburg’s concept of “nachleben”, “survival” of ancient images :  “les pouvoirs d’adhérence et de revenance dont les images se montrent porteuses” […] “ Une image survivante est une image qui, ayant perdu sa valeur d’usage et sa signification de départ, fait cependant retour, comme un fantôme » .