The Database as System and Cultural Form: Anatomies of Cultural Narratives

The term ‘Database Aesthetics’ has become a catchword of the digital realm and poses interesting semantic questions that seem to outline the field of research and art relating to databases itself. What exactly do we mean by ‘database aesthetics’? In discourse on digital art, the term is frequently used to describe the aesthetic principles applied in imposing the logic of the database to any type of information, filtering data collections, and visualizing data. In that sense, database aesthetics often becomes a conceptual potential and cultural form--a way of revealing (visual) patterns of knowledge, beliefs, and social behavior. The term is seldom used to refer to the aesthetics of the database as structure itself, although it certainly implies that meaning and the structure of a database is inherently connected to the results produced by the filtering of the data contained in it and the nature of its visualization.