gravitymax in transition

Around the turn of the century, Geocities had tens of millions of “homesteaders” as the digital tennants were called and was bought by Yahoo! for three and a half billion dollars. Ten years later in 2009, as other metaphors of the internet (such as the social network) had taken over, and the homesteaders had left their properties vacant after migrating to Facebook, Geocities was shutdown and deleted. In an heroic effort to preserve 10 years of collaborative work by 35 million people, the Archive Team made a backup of the site just before it shut down. The resulting 650 Gigabyte bittorrent file is the digital Pompeii that is the subject of an interactive excavation that allows you to wander through an episode of recent online history.

Utopian and radical architects in the 1960s predicted that cities in the future would not only be made of brick and mortar, but also defined by bits and flows of information. The urban dweller would become a nomad who inhabits a space in constant flux, mutating in real time. Their vision has taken on new meaning in an age when information networks rule over many of the city’s functions, and define our experiences as much as the physical infrastructures, while mobile technologies transform our sense of time and of space.

wireless of the world 2 by timo. via touch.

Le Grand Content examines the omnipresent Powerpoint-culture in search for its philosophical potential. Intersections and diagrams are assembled to form a grand ‘association-chain-massacre’. which challenges itself to answer all questions of the universe and some more. Of course, it totally fails this assignment, but in its failure it still manages to produce some magical nuance and shades between the great topics death, cable tv, emotions and hamsters.

via iso50.

virtual gravity is the diploma project by silke hilsing at the university of applied sciences würzburg. the project explores physical manifestation of data via an analog scale in a beautiful tangible interface.

The basic interaction is to weight and compare the virtual weight of information. The kind of  action reminds deeply of handling with a real beam scale. So the audience has the possibility to use his foreknowledge of everyday life, it knows what how to use a scale, how it reacts and how the relation between two weights is to be read and interpreted.

There are images which are tricky to slot into the index of representation. Perhaps because they consist of numbers or writing systems and as such are intended not so much to demonstrate as to be deciphered. These could be instructions for some behaviour to be enacted in the future. Or perhaps notes or sketches of events in the past. Categorising such images involves using terms such as print, trace, index, visualisation and notation systems. Now the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, in cooperation with the ZKM Karlsruhe has collected together 450 exhibits in an exhibition titled “Notation, calculation and form in the arts.” It is a fascinating show for anyone interested in how images can become independent from what they represent. And almost in passing, it points to the sort of things that we can expect from the connection between art and science that we are hearing so much about lately.

via sign and sight.

data visualization + fashion = wearable ambient display

Ryoko Ueoka and Hiroki Kobayashi gave Artfuture a tour through their collaborative and highly interactive Wearable Forest project in SIGGRAPH 2008′s Slow Art gallery. Not only is the wearable dress soft and comfortable, it shows the activity in the forest of Japan by the number and speed of change in the lights on the garment – the same place the sound for the project is taken from, piped in live over the Internet.

social collider, a google chrome experiments created by sascha pohflepp and karsten schmidt, is a javascript-based data visualization app that reveals cross-connections between twitter conversations. you enter a keyword (based on user, phrase, or trend) and a timeframe (from a day to a month), commit, then watch the tweets collide. brightly colored lines then trace related topics or replies in scribbles and spirals, connecting tiny white dots that represent individual returned tweets. and….. that’s pretty all there is to it. you can’t even cancel after you hit the collide button. but that’s the reason i like social collider. i like the fact that it is so simple that it made me think about the possible connections in and effects of my personal interactions. it would have been really boring if it’d only been about process and statistics.

With the Internet’s promise of instant and absolute connectedness, two things appear to be curiously underrepresented: both temporal and lateral perspective of our data-trails. Yet, the amount of data we are constantly producing provides a whole world of contexts, many of which can reveal astonishing relationships if only looked at through time.

This experiment explores these possibilities by starting with messages on the microblogging-platform Twitter. One can search for usernames or topics, which are tracked through time and visualized much like the way a particle collider draws pictures of subatomic matter. Posts that didn’t resonate with anyone just connect to the next item in the stream. The ones that did, however, spin off and horizontally link to users or topics who relate to them, either directly or in terms of their content.

for 1 week last year, french art duo hehe (helen evans and heiki hansen) illuminated the night sky of helsinki with green laser outlines of the emission of a power plant, literally highlighting the energy consumption of local residents. residents were asked to lower their energy use and observe the visible changes. nuage vert (green cloud) has won several environmental art awards. read more on the nuage vert blog:

Nuage Vert is a communal event for the area of Ruoholahti, which anticipates esoteric cults centred on energy and transforms an active power plant into a space for art, a living factory. In tandem, as a reversal of conventional roles whereby the post-industrial factory is turned into space for culture, Kaapeli (the cultural factory) becomes the site of operation and Salmisaari (the industrious factory) becomes the site of spectacle