gravitymax in transition

art by telephone is a conceptual art exhibition curated by chicago’s museum of contemporary art in 1968 that sadly never exhibited. the recordings of phone conversations (instructions) with artists such as sol lewitt, john baldessari, joseph kosuth, jan dibbets, hans haacke and bruce nauman, however, survived in the form of a record and lives on as documentations of a pure concept. listen to the entire recording at network research.

christopher meyer, ceo of monitor networks, talked about the possibilities and concerns in data gathering and tracking via cheap sensors, mainly in the commercial context. as the technology gets developed and finetuned, i see many opportunities in how this can applied to our lives in a more ubiquitious way than just metadata and analytics. orignally found via idea projects.

a slight deviation from the usual topics, this post is interesting in the social and cultural perspective. a recent washington post article reports how homeless people are using cell phones to track job opportunities, update food stamp applications, and communicate their whereabouts to others. as pay-as-you-go phone prices go down, society’s urban nomads are becoming resourceful in finding ways to get back on their feet and perhaps maintain a small amount of dignity and independence.

“Phones are really a lifeline for many people,” said Adam Rocap, director of social services at Miriam’s Kitchen, a nonprofit drop-in center for the homeless. During a string of attacks against homeless people sleeping downtown in the fall, two victims called 911 for help after they were assaulted, he said.

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.

a very entertaining interview with matteo pasquinelli on his new book animal spirits: a bestiary of the commons. pasquinella chuckled his way thru a dizzying variety of topics regarding digital culture and network theory. dubstep is likened to the anthem of current our doom and gloom times. and parasites are not such bad things at all.

Surfing the waves of crisis – from energy, to environment to the current financial crisis, Pit Schultz and Matteo Pasquinelli talk failed metropolis, cyberpunk and underground culture. A history lesson for urban survival in the future, they discuss notions from J.G. Ballard, digital sub cultures and parasitic cybernetics.  Matteo bids a dirty farewell to media culture!

Matteo Pasquinelli is a writer, curator and researcher at Queen Mary University of London. He edited the collections Media Activism (2002) and C’Lick Me: A Netporn Studies Reader (2007). With Katrien Jacobs and the Institute of Network Cultures, he organised the Art and Politics of Netporn conference (2005). He lives in Amsterdam.