The Inhabitants is a time-based fiction which divides the day into severals daily life activities, like "cook", "dream", "eat", "play", "refresh", "trash", "tea", "work" or "wait", and maps these activities into the Googlehouse, a spatial database of rooms built from searches into Google's image database. The Inhabitants presents its data as an immersive environment that invites the viewer to navigate through a landscape of video, sound and texts of domestic places. The time of visit is synchronised to each user's local computer time, so at 10 PM you might find yourself in the bathroom or at 4 PM you are having a tea in the kitchen. Both this personalised approach and the experience of being "at home" encourage the user to feel like an inhabitant of a data-environment, rather than just a data-voyeur.
"Database Dilemmas" explores how artists have discovered the obsession with organising and archiving data in a database as a new domain for artistic, social and aesthetic experiments, developing different approaches toward its specific characteristics. Their dilemmas concern the narrative [how to create narrative from a static collection of data?], the formal/structural [how to change the specific indexical form of the database?] and the socio-political [how to change its character from a closed, controlled system into an open, public one?]. How do they approach the traditional model of the database? With which objectives do they transform its static form and encyclopaedic structure? What are their poetics, aesthetics and ethics?
'Database Dilemmas' was conceived by Deanna Herst for Impakt Online.
Marika Dermineur (France) is a Netart Artist who works on questions related to the network and researches the possibilities of a program to produce language, structure, images and sounds. She studied interactive video, interactive installations and theoretical research about artistic creation on Internet at the Sorbonne, ENSAD and CNAM. Her works have been shown in several international exhibitions and festivals. She is an active member of the experimental web platform "Incident.net".
http://www.incident.net
