Ping Geography (image above, video below), a work by Cristobal Mendoza, is another work which looks at how networks collapse distances (see the last post City Distances).

A developing work that involves the constant translation of current network ping times into geographical distances, creating a map-based visualization that compresses and stretches according to network conditions between the client application and user-specified servers. The basic process involves the geolocation of the servers and the client, and its subsequent plotting on a world map. The map then distorts according to ping times. The visualization is fully navigable, with panning and zooming available.

City Distances (image above) is a work by Bestario who created the Atlas of Electromagnetic Space for the AV Festival 08 in Middlesbrough. Continuing with their research into graphing data and “making the complex comprehensible”, City Distances creates a map of the world comparing real geographical distances with informational distances as defined by Google. The map measures connectivity between locations, revealing the speed of connections and the development of networks there, the more numerous the nodes and the shorter the connections between them, the richer the economy of those locations.

This tridemsional scheme represents the strength of relations between cities from searches on google. The main idea is to compare the number of pages on internet [sic] where the two cities appear one close to the other, with the number of pages they appear isolated. This position indicates some kind of intensity of relation between the cities. After measuring this “google proximity” we divide it by its geographical distance. By this process we obtain an indicator about the strength of the relation in spite of the real distance, a kind of informational distance between cities.

Two networked art works by Mary Flanagan. Ineffable (image above, video below) is a software work which reads emails between two correspondents and maps the use of language to explore the questions:

How are different kinds of language, and thus sounds, used in correspondences with different people? How do we “sound” to those reading our emails, and how does the email of others sound to us?

The mappings of the emails structure, phoneme’s syllables etc. are displayed as visuals and sound. To do this:

[ineffable] collects chronological information, time between emails, length of correspondence, and most importantly, the kinds of phonetic sounds used by a correspondent in his or her writing and generates a sonification and visualization of this content. Written in Java, [ineffable] analyzes a user’s emails to or from a particular person and maps the language used by examining the phonemic makeup of the words utilized in the correspondence. The work “reads” a pair of user’s email archives and, side by side, analyzes the words therein, grouping them based on the recipient, date, time elapse between correspondences, overall amount of correspondence. Most importantly, we have the program find a “sound signature” to the words used in words, paragraphs, sentences and finally, the overall email set.

Phage (image above left) and Collection (image above right) bear strong resemblances to each other and seem like a reworking of what is essentially the same software. Phage creates sculptural spaces from the content of your hard drive. It is:

is a computer application which is viral– an artificial life form. [phage] filters through all available material on a specified workstation and places it in an alternate context-a visible and audible moving 3D spatialized world. I encourage this virus lifeform to spread via email (but only by the consent of the host)…By mapping a user’s unique experiences– through images, downloads, web sites visited, emails–the computer program creates spatial memory maps that not only reflect the computer and technoculture in content, but the user’s artifacts from his or her interactions. In this way, the [phage] program reflects each user as an individual. The work, in fact, becomes about the user’s experience with the particular computer.

Collection creates similar sculptural spaces but by a different means, it:

gathers up found material from various users’ hard drives and collects them on a centralized server. Going from computer to computer, [collection] scours drives and collects bits and pieces of user’s data - sentences from emails, graphics, web browser cached images, business letters, sound files-and creates a mobile mix of user experiences, operating system files, and normally hidden materials… [collection] is significant because it calls into question the nature of memory as a network through its allegorical use of the internet as a collective memory space. By mapping a user’s, or group of users’, unique experiences-through images, downloads, web sites visited, emails-it creates spatial memory maps that not only reflect the computer and technoculture in content, but the user’s artifacts from his or her interactions.

Graphing or mapping networks allows us to visualise the relationship between nodes in the network / points in the graph and how their links are formed. Graphs in art have been around for quite a while, the earliest frequent use I can think of is in the works and lectures of Josef Beuys (image above, Untitled (Sun State), 1974), the works of Conceptual Artists such as Art & Language, Roman Opalka, On Kawara and Minimal Artists such as Sol LeWitt (in subtle ways) although there are probably earlier examples.

An exhibition at The Drawing Center in New York in 2003, which I found the website of as I was following a trail on an unrelated topic, made me aware of Mark Lombardi’s drawings (images below), graphs of political, social or economic structures. These works seem to mark a re-emerging trend within art to use graphs once again (note Jeremy Deller’s, The History of the World which won the Turner Prize in 2004, image above) and are both beautiful enough to rival Edward Tufte’s superb graphing used for communication design and challenging in making us think about how small / closed / inter-connected these structures actually are.

How does this relate back to networked art? Well net.art has been doing this type of graphing / mapping work for years, from conceptual uses such as MTAA’s Simple Net Art Diagram to more complex (technically) works such as Martin Wattenbergs Idea Line and seems highly reminiscent of works such as Josh On and Futurefarmers, They Rule (image below). So perhaps issues and ideas within new media art are now starting to emerge in the more long running contemporary art forms?

This is the second of three posts on works (the first post is Screen Threshold) which are related with regards to how they transmit / emit information to connected devices to form a uni-directional network. While most of these works are almost ten years old what is fascinating about them is their use (and their solution by means) of standard everyday equipment in unique configurations i.e. the use of a computer monitor / screen as an output device (light received by light diodes) which actuates change in devices rather than users.

Moody Mushroom Floor (images above) is a networked:

smell/sound/light floor that develops moods and aspirations in response to the ways that people react to the invidual outputs.

Created by Hague, Design and Research (Usman Haque) who has collaborated with Aether Architecture on various works such as the WiFi Camera.

The Moody Mushroom Floor is a system of 8 input-output devices which, through their programming and sensors, create an internal representation of their surrounding environment and which act upon the environment with the outputs they are provided with. Their actions are determined by their goals — the important thing, however, is that each mushroom sets its own particular goals at any particular moment. These goals are given names of moods like “spoilt brat” or “alluring” or “capricious” and define what the mushroom hopes to achieve.

Each device…outputs a sequence of light, smell and sound which will tend either to attract human beings or repel them (or neither). The devices fall somewhere between unintelligent ‘nodes’ and more sophisticated ‘agents’.

The ‘agents’ emit output sequences which depend on the particular mode they happen to be in. They then check to see how successful that particular output sequence was (i.e. whether it attracted or repelled as intended) and a new output “strategy” is emitted, having undergone quasi-genetic operation to try and improve the output strategy for that particular mode, for that particular ‘agent’. The output strategies are successively evolved genetically and will tend to converge on six individualised sequences for each ‘agent’ in its various modes.

In the image above (bottom right) you can see light diodes (receiving diodes not LEDS) attached to a computer monitor.

Work originally seen in Responsive Environments Architecture, Art and Design.