i want to read all the news
Martin John Callahan: I Want To See All Of The News From Today
Currently a teaching fellow at the Slade School of Art in London, Callahan’s sparse electronic work touches the rawer nerve-tips of our media-immersed selves. This current piece is typical of his approach.
“Borges’ map, described in “On Exactitude in Science”, imagines an empire where the science of cartography has become so exacting that only a map of the same scale as the empire itself is sufficient. This seems prescient of the increasing digitization, both of the world about us and correspondingly of our own lives. The world’s fastest computer in 2006, IBM’s Blue Gene L, has more processing capability than the 500 most powerful computers of 2001 combined. Blue Gene L is 15 times more powerful than its predecessor: within five seconds it can produce a volume of data equivalent to the total information held in the British Library”. The data collected by our networks, in data warehouses and elsewhere, vastly exceeds that which could be recorded about our world and knowledge on the 1:1 scale Borges imagined.”
Martin John Callanan, December 2006
