in effigie
Christopher Baker with Márton András Juhász: Murmur Study #1
From the project homepage: “Murmur Study is an installation that examines the rise of micro-messaging technologies such as Twitter and Facebook’s status update. One might describe these messages as a kind of digital small talk. But unlike water-cooler conversations, these fleeting thoughts are accumulated, archived and digitally-indexed by corporations. While the future of these archives remains to be seen, the sheer volume of publicly accessible personal – often emotional – expression should give us pause.
This installation consists of 30 thermal printers that continuously monitor Twitter for new messages containing variations on common emotional utterances. Messages containing hundreds of variations on words such as argh, meh, grrrr, oooo, ewww, and hmph, are printed as an endless waterfall of text accumulating in tangled piles below.”
Another from Illinoise: Visualizing Music. Word Useage Circle for “Chicago”
Each panel contains a circle that represents a different song containing lyrics. Each concentric circle within the larger circle corresponds to a word used in the song, as indicated on the lower portion of each panel. The thickness of each circle relates to the number of times each word was used, with the most commonly used words at the outermost edges of the circles.
Click through for more and to enlarge.
Clive Thompson on the Future of Reading in a Digital World
Agreed. People will always read - that’s not going to go away, no matter how much Twitter and the like annihilate our attention spans. What’s needed is a new model that takes out the middleman - in this case, the publisher/distributor - and gets words in the hands of the reader (either literally or figuratively) and the reader’s money in the hands of the writer.
(via bildungsroman)
I’ve always thought that science was beautiful. But now I see that the combination of art and science - that, that is the peak of beauty.
