Investigating the inter-relationship of Media Art and the Data Archive in the data-visualizations of Man Ray, Lev Manovich and Thorbjørn Lausten.

This paper investigates the relationship of media art and the data archive. I propose that a complex situation of representation emerges between art and archive, which are operating in matrices of creativity rather than with semantic connections. From being a medium of memory (Benjamin), the data archive is framing complex mediacy of real-world and data representations. I argue that this transformation is particularly visible in media art practices dealing with aesthetics of mediacy and working with archives of (big) data. Thus, from the media art practices that may be found in the (very different iterations/applications of) data-visualizations of Man Ray, Lev Manovich, Jacob Kierkegaard, Eric Andersen, and Thorbjørn Lausten this paper will argue that, what may be termed as, a creative 'matrix thinking' emerges.