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Name   : Bas Raijmakers
Time   : 16:00 - 18:00 (V2_Exhibition Space)
Subject: Dialogue With The Knowbotic South
Date   : Saturday 20 January 1996

Entering the big hall of V2_Organization, descending a dark staircase, I am happy to wear my North Sports Alu-jacket. Cold wind wants to play with me, I have to pull my zipper all the way up. We are supposed to be 'Proud to be Flesh,' but right now it is not so nice to have a body at all. When it's freezing cold I'd rather go virtual.

Arriving at the bottom of the stairs I can't see anything but a huge screen with something like a snow blizzard on it. I hear the sound of the blizzard in my ears, but also a nice voice is present. Really present - in the flesh that is.

The voice is Christian Huebler's (he is with Yvonne Wilhelm - both are from Knowbotic Research.) He explains that what we see is data generated by a couple of icebergs on the Antarctic. The icebergs are bugged with instruments measuring their temperature, movement and some other variables. These data are sent to research institutes on the South Pole via satellite. Various types of analyses turn the data into knowledge regarding, for instance, the melting of the polar caps.

So, why are icebergs invited to The Next 5 Minutes? Well, it's not the icebergs, it's their representation! Knowbotic Research turned the icebergs of the South Pole into a medium that can talk to us, that we can experience, something we can relate to. The data generated by the icebergs are dull and the analyses from the research institutes are complex. But the huge database they constitute becomes meaningful once people start to explore it, start to wander through it.

This 'wandering through the data' is what Knowbotic Research has made very attractive. The cold wind, the blizzard on the screen, are all representations of accelerated iceberg data (three months looped in 5 minutes). That sets the scene. You can really enter by putting on a jacket (tough luck, that jacket is not warm), wearing headphones, holding a joystick and looking through a monocle. Once you're in you will meet agents, who show themselves as concentrated clouds of snowflakes. If you grab them with your joystick, and hold on, they will release the knowledge they contain; short abstracts of the research conducted by academic institutions on the South Pole.

The discussion afterwards (in the presence of the media cafe people that presented earlier this afternoon) makes it clear that what we have here is a navigation tool for the info overload era. With representations of data like "Dialogue With The Knowbotic South" viewing data can become something as pleasant as taking a walk in the woods. You come across all kinds of nice things and you don't notice a lot too. You might even get lost, but you will experience something, that is for sure! With this tool you can immerse yourself and feel at home in data fields that were rather abstract before. You can make combinations between fields of knowledge as you wish. Think of wandering around all data generated by cellular phones in Rotterdam right now: positions, conversations, demographic data of the owners, projections of the development of the mobile phone market, social science research on the private uses in daily life.

My guess is that in a few years time we won't go to media art venues to see installations like this one. You will experience "Dialogue With The Knowbotic South" in a Natural History Museum or a Technology Museum that wants to create a special experience for its visitors. It might even become an educational video game. Knowbotic Research does fundamental work in the area of data representation, trying to make the rhizomes in which data have accumulated visible. But at the same time exiting environments with more than a theoretical potential emerge.

Bas Raijmakers (bas@ACSi.nl)