links and shit

its always hard to start new projects and i have a few ideas, but mainly need to do shit loads of research before i can even begin designing or thinking about the aesthetics. In the meantime there are loads of links and vids for some cool stuff.

Art Installations:

i've never really thought about doing an interactive art installation, but now i've looked at them a bit more i really like the idea of it. Quite like the idea of a screen based installation but the reasons i'm not entirely convinced of this is that 1) i always do screen based stuff and 2) so does everyone else. There are some that work really well like fallings times which is:

"a real-time news "translation machine" representing appearing & disappearing information about our times. the news content is reduced to the most frequent headlines & their according keywords. the reduced news headlines are then visually translated in a dynamic pictogram language that is considered to be universal & instantly understandable. online users can add keywords to an icon to determine which news will be displayed.

"Falling Times refers to the heavy InfoPollution we live in. the InfoSociety has created a new kind of consumer – the InfoConsumer!"

Also really like this installation called The Dumpster.

It is an aesthetic portrait of romantic breakups from a group of 20,000 blog posts describing breakups in 2005. this 'social data browser' visualises inferred reasons for the break-up, who was involved, age & gender of the author, & emotional state, with similar breakups showing up with similar colours. It seems to be another screen based design, tho that may just be in the context of being displayed online. I liked this mainly for its interface in that it's intuative but still has a hell of a lot of info to it.

I think its intuative because it adheres to some of the psychology of design in that people will click on things that are moving. All the dots are moving, so its obvious what to click on, and when the mouse moves, the bottom and side bars move as well. Interesting design, but im not wowed by the idea, but then i'm cynical and laugh at american teenager's pain.

Also like something called "Emotional Traffic Display" which is a real-time visualisation & sonification that runs during an on-stage musical performance using data from the Internet about the emotions of the world. the size of the text reflects the emotion's presence on the web, while layers build up, making the display more detailed & complex. a 'meridian line' scans the visualisation, creating the rhythm of the music being played.