With the support of BIARTS, The Israeli Center for Digital Art invited YoHa- Graham Harwood and Matsuko Yokokoji, to conduct a three session workshop, as part of the Jessy Cohen Project.
The workshop will take place in Lazaros Community Center, 27 Sanhedrin St, Jessy Cohen, Holon, between February 14th to 16th.
Databases are operating on us and through us at the time we operate on them. They are allowing new forms of power to emerge from the machine’s ability to push and process large sets of information into the gaps between knowledge and power. As databases order, compare and sort they create new views of the information they contain. New perspectives amplify, speed-up and restructure particular forms of power as they supersede others.
A database can also be thought of as an architecture that holds a list in a particular shape while we ask it questions. Its lists mapping out a collection of objects into recipes for action in the realm of the governance of everything.
Creating a database throws a particular light on the items it records. It breaks the process down into discrete steps of re-ordering transforming it’s users and subjects along with the data atoms at it’s heart. The database compares lists and creates new knowledge from the relations that sorting produces. This new knowledge then acts as a kind of remote control on the elements it defined.
Databases can be thought of as the steam engines of information, knowledge and power rapidly moving through us, separating us, reforming us, folding us up into its parts. Its relations and queries picking us up, move us around and put us back down somewhere known yet unfamiliar.
Tuesday, February 15th, 17:00-19:00
In the first session Harwood will lay out the domain of the database through practical explorations, discussing the projects “Invisible Airs, Databases, Expenditure and Power”http://yoha.co.uk/invisible which interrogates openness as a technology of power and “Coal Fired Computers” http://yoha.co.uk/cfc exploring databases as an actor in the story of how we are discovered by coal and “Lungs” http://yoha.co.uk/lungs which is a memorial to the 4,500 slave laborers that worked in Hall A of the former Deutschen Waffen und Munitionsfabriken A.G. Now the ZKM (Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Germany)
Wednesday, February 16th, 15:00-19:00
In the second session Harwood and Yokokoji (YoHa) will encourage the attendees of a Database Documentary workshop to reflect on the role of the database in the governance of everyday life in Israel. This will help form YoHa’s research over the coming days and provide the bases for
Thursday, February 17th, 9:00-16:00
In the third session, YoHa will conduct and document individual interviews with the participants. It is hoped that from these interviews YoHa will produce a short film.
*The workshop will be conducted in English.
Participation is free of charge; the number of participants is limited.
Please register in advance at: 03-5567892
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