gravitymax in transition

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.

interview with artist and computer programmer john f. simon jr. simon recently opened his show outside in at maramotti collection in italy. the exhibit looks back at 10 years of the artist’s research into software art up to his latest piece vision (2009, below).

the artist maintains a daily practice of drawing and would use these drawings as the base of his work. by transferring them to code, the final display of endless combinations of colors and patterns picks up emergent patterns from the systemic medium that talk about its own structure and limitations.

in this interview simon also talked about the relationship between his visual art and technology, how advances in computing power had afforded him a larger voice, and the potential migration (reincarnation?) of his work into future hardware.

outside in is open until may 3, 2009.

1975 classic text on computer art by leslie mezei. still relevant and important, if not more, in the age of ready-made effects. as i’m doing more and more visualist work, i think it’s good to remind myself from time to time to not get too carried away with using too many bells and whistles. like any good art, thoughtfulness and restrain go a long way. especially when you’re still learning.

Today we are left with a small number of people from both sides, each of whom is aware of the long term effort needed to exploit the potential. The promise is as great as ever, but, as usual, requires more application and ingenuity and application than at first realized. The artists, and especially the art students, are willing to learn programming and some mathematics, and to learn to think in an algorithmic, process oriented manner. More importantly, in my view, they are ready to transcend the technological art so far pursued, and learn something of the underlying scientific ideas. [Applying any new technology slavishly results in imitative work, often foreshadowed by visionary artists long before the new technology. (Compare Picasso's drawings with some of our transformations, such as my BIKINI SHIFTED).] It is the new concepts and ideas, the new ways of thinking provided by the information sciences that will provide this. I am referring to our enriched understanding of system, structure, randomness and process as well as of the very process of communication and language, and the more realistic accounts of the methods of discovery in the sciences and the arts.

full text here.