Modular visions: referents, context and strategies for database open media works

The processes of constructing meaning in digital database environments entail a paradigm shift from previous models of audio-visual communication. Media emerging from the Electro-mechanical era (film/TV/video) present fixed spatio-temporal linearity and material conditions which objectify and render passive viewer and process. The problematic aspects of cinematic communication were addressed by Latin American filmmakers of the "Third Cinema" movement. Their concerns and approach presaged and assisted an understanding of the radical redefinition of audio-visual communication possible with digital databases. The conceptual and aesthetic aspirations of "Third Cinema" artists such as Julio Garcia Espinosa and Fernando Solanas were ultimately contradictory to linear media and find their fitting medium in digital modular construction. The materiality of database expression lacks an intrinsic temporal or spatial state and permits a more dynamic and multidirectional set of power relationships between author/s, piece, viewer/s. Other important referents for contextualising database art are modern art practitioners that rejected linear representational space and fractured the centrality of authorship. The author's own work, "...two, three, many Guevaras," an exploratory database environment, embraces the redefinition of process as artistic expression, the empowerment of interacting generative forces, and serves to illustrate the revolutionary potential of the new media.