We Read, We Tweet by Justin Blinder, another language based work however this time not visualised as such, is a Twitter / Google Maps / New York Times mashup work which:

geographically visualizes the dissemination of New York Times articles through Twitter. Each line connects the location of a tweet to the contextual location of the New York Times article it referenced. The lines are generated in a sequence based on the time in which a tweet occurs…The articles and tweets are constantly being aggregated and stored in a database, making use of the Twitter, Backtweets, Google Maps, and New York Times Articles API. Every 10 minutes, the Backtweets API is queried to find the most recent New York Times articles that have been tweeted about. For each article found, the New York Times Articles API is queried and if a contextual location is found, that location is then geocoded using the Google Maps API. Every tweet that mentions this article is also geocoded using the Google Maps API, and both the article and tweets are stored in a database.

Back to works which have a textual/language emphasis for the moment.

Delicious Poetry by Art is Open Source (xDxD.vs.xDxD / Salvatore Iaconesi and penelope.di.pixel / Oriana Persico) is a net.art work which assembles itself from popular links on Delicious to:

visually build a chaotic poem. An everchanging complex composition built on people’s wishes, desires, tastes and emotions…The generative poems composed by the work produce pages that are a dynamic assemblage of the things that internet users deem as being interesting at a certain time. This is why search engines and content aggregators seem to find these chaotic poems so interesting, finding them completely filled with the “hot” keywords of the moment. So much that they tent to spider, cache, index, rate and categorize them.

Further information about the work can be seen here and here.

Staying with works of a largely textual nature for the moment Wandern im Wissen (Wandering in Knowledge) is an installation currently installed in the stairwell of the State and University library Bremen in Germany created by the University of the Arts Bremen.

The work is similar in several ways to LPDT2 (the last post), the most important being that it sources literary information for its content, in this instance not the online Gutenberg Project but the catalog of the library it is installed in. In a sense it is an interface, a screen, to the libraries content making it more visible and immediate to its users/visitors.

Searching and retrieving information are the main requests of the library’s visitors. An almost endless flow of information inquiries are obtained and fulfilled on daily basis. In this respect, the students of the University of the Arts Bremen granted an aesthetic and poetic expression to this invisible procedure…a sculpture of folded paper demonstrates the connection between the traditional storage medium and the digital information world. The permanent flow of information inquiries at the SuUB runs through on a vertical axis between four floors of the building. The random results of the inquiries release corresponding visuals of text and pictures which cause curiosity for the various activites in the library. The media sculpture highlights the abundance of the mental processes, which take place simultaneously in the library. The retrieval inquiries result in new collages of visuals of text and pictures, which form an aesthetic translation of the search procedure. The searched words, then, fill the pool of data at the ground of the stairway. Altogether the media installation poses questions about the function of the information in the age of the increasing communicational isolation. In regard to the title, the visitor literally passes through the world of knowledge.

Made with VVVV and Ruby, the work is a collaboration between Niruba Balsingam, Manuel Dreesmann, Freja Enholm, Linda Freybott, David Grünwald, Andreas Haller, Stefan Ihmig, Claudius Kirsch, Shushi Li, Henrik Lippke, Maha Mahmood, Isabel Micheel, Josef Rissling, Dawei Wu, Marek Mateusz Majewski, Silke Bussen, Prof. Roland Lambrette, Peter Gombac and Eno Henze.

There are numerous sites online documenting this work. A wordpress weblog, a Tumblr weblog and a Flickr set.

Work originally seen via Henrik Lippkes website.

Hallucinations (and the real) (image above, video below) by JD Walsh is audio-visual work which composes itself as a result of search engine query results based on key phrases from a text taken from Albert Hoffman’s recollections of early experiments with LSD. A database cinema of sorts.

The result is a dual-channel projection of the software’s output – the text on one screen and the image on the other. Sound is projected into the room. Because of the random elements in the software, the perception of the images are always changing. Each image seems to take on a new meaning depending on which text is next to it and which sound accompanies it.

A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter (image above) by Caleb Larsen is a work which perpetually auctions itself on eBay accumulating (or not) value as art markets and the perceived value of the artists work rises.

This sculpture exists in eternal transactional flux. It is a physical sculpture that is perptually attempting to auction itself on eBay. Every ten minutes the black box pings a server on the internet via the ethernet connection to check if it is for sale on the eBay. If its auction has ended or it has sold, it automatically creates a new auction of itself. If a person buys it on eBay, the current owner is required to send it to the new owner. The new owner must then plug it into ethernet, and the cycle repeats itself.

To view the current auction of the work (image above) visit its eBay page here.

The work will be showing at the Lighthouse in Brighton from the 28 August – 5 September 2010 as part of the digital design conference, dConstruct.