Real-Time Art
Focusing on digital art that makes use of real-time data sources. Also the home of Switchboard, a Processing library that provides a conceptual-level interface to many web services and network functions.
News
:: Dreamlines
Dreamlines is a non-linear, interactive visual experience. The user enters one or more words that define the subject of a dream he would like to dream. The system looks in the Web for images related to those words, and takes them as input to generate an ambiguous painting, in perpetual change, where elements fuse into one another, in a process analogous to memory and free association.
posted April 22nd by Jeff in art:: Thesis defense successful
The thesis defense was a success, and I would like to thank everyone who helped me out in this process, including my defense committee: Ian Bogost, Michael Mateas, and Janet Murray, my very understanding and patient girlfriend, Tina for her tireless proffreading, and all of the artists and programmers who inspired this project.
Whereas previously my attention might have been monopolized by the thesis effort, now I truly want to open up Switchboard to community use, so I will do everything I can to make that possible. This starts with putting Switchboard on Sourceforge, which I am working on today.
posted April 17th by jeff in news:: Flight Patterns
FAA data was parsed and plotted using the Processing programming environment.
posted April 17th by Jeff in art:: Celestial Mechanics
Visuilizations of airborne objects such as satellites and aircraft. Generated from the orbits of Low Orbiting Satellites of the Earth, based on data from SSR's (Satellite Situation Reports) collected from the public domain that date from 1994 to the present.
posted April 17th by Jeff in art:: Universal Digest Machine
The Universal Digest Machine is an installation featuring a web spider that crawls the net, digesting web pages and outputting a brief analysis of their contents.
posted April 17th by Jeff in art:: Witness
Witness is a screensaver that visualizes activities taking place on Death Row in the State of Texas in real time. Data from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice's web page, http://www.tdcj.state.tx.us/stat/deathrow.htm drives the image.
posted April 17th by Jeff in art:: Police State
PoliceState is a Carnivore client that attempts to reverse the surveillance role of law enforcement into a subservient one for the data being gathered. The client consists of a fleet of 20 radio controlled police vehicles that are all simultaneously controlled by data coming into the main client. The client looks for packet information relating to domestic US terrorism. Once found, the text is then assigned to an active police radio code, translated to its binary equivalent, and sent to the array of police cars as a movement sequence. In effect, the data being "snooped" by the authorities is the same data used to control the police vehicles. Thus the police become puppets of their own surveillance. This signifies a reversal of the control of information appropriated by police by using the same information to control them.
posted April 17th by Jeff in art:: Carnivore PE
Carnivore is a surveillance tool for data networks. At the heart of the project is CarnivorePE, a software application that listens to all Internet traffic (email, web surfing, etc.) on a specific local network. Next, CarnivorePE serves this data stream to interfaces called "clients." These clients are designed to animate, diagnose, or interpret the network traffic in various ways. Use CarnivorePE to run Carnivore clients from your own desktop, or use it to make your own clients.
posted April 17th by Jeff in art:: JJ
JJ is a software agent which uses facial expressions to visualize the emotional content of network traffic. JJ is implemented as a Carnivore Client, an open-source format for network surveillance applications.
posted April 17th by Jeff in art
:: Synapsis
The Synapsis client visualizes the actual packets flowing on the network and partially reveals the network topology, at the same time that utlizies that input to generate a unique sound ambience.
posted April 17th by Jeff in art:: Flickr Graph
Flickr Graph is an application that explores the social relationships inside flickr.com. It makes use of the classic attraction-repulsion algorithm for graphs.
posted April 17th by Jeff in infoviz:: Out of the Ordinary
Out of the Ordinary is a Carnivore client, a network visualization software, which measures and maps the probability of communication between computers on the network that the software resides on, and between computers on the network and the Internet.
posted April 17th by Jeff in art
:: Friendster Pachinko
In August 2003 the Pretendster project began spidering the Friendster network, storing IDs, first names, photographs, and friend connections in a database. Friendster Pachinko uses this database to allow people a unique gaming opportunity: gambling with friends!
posted April 17th by Jeff in art:: anemone
using the process of organic information design to visualize the changing structure of a web site, juxtaposed with usage information
posted April 17th by Jeff in infoviz:: valence
Valence is a set of software sketches about building representations that explore the structures and relationships inside very large sets of information.
posted April 17th by Jeff in infoviz:: They Rule
They Rule aims to provide a glimpse of some of the relationships of the US ruling class. It takes as its focus the boards of some of the most powerful U.S. companies, which share many of the same directors. Some individuals sit on 5, 6 or 7 of the top 500 companies. It allows users to browse through these interlocking directories and run searches on the boards and companies. A user can save a map of connections complete with their annotations and email links to these maps to others. They Rule is a starting point for research about these powerful individuals and corporations.
posted April 17th by Jeff in art:: WordCount
WordCount™ is an artistic experiment in the way we use language. It presents the 86,800 most frequently used English words, ranked in order of commonness. Each word is scaled to reflect its frequency relative to the words that precede and follow it, giving a visual barometer of relevance. The larger the word, the more we use it. The smaller the word, the more uncommon it is.
posted April 17th by Jeff in infoviz:: Iraq War Fatalities
Iraq War Coalition Fatalities is a chart of the US and coalition military fatalities that have occured in the war in Iraq since the onset, mapped across the dimension of time and space. It is an ongoing project that is updated regularly, and will continue to go on as long as the war does.
posted April 17th by Jeff in infoviz:: iTunes Signature Maker
iTunes Signature Maker (iTSM) analyzes your music collection and creates a short audio signature to represent who you are and what you listen to. After it checks your system configuration and asks you a few simple questions, iTSM will spend a few minutes analyzing your collection and generating the audio signature.
posted April 17th by Jeff in art:: dotdotdot
dotdotdot is a new web and installation work using motion capture to locate a figure in a virtual space where the user can inhabit this figure and navigate the image.
dotdotdot is the net's first interactive radio streaming motion capture project. It is a on-line virtual choreographic work where viewers select the soundtrack whilst driving the performance animations.
posted April 17th by Jeff in art:: Eigenradio
The webcast of Eigenradio did involve a computer (well, eight of them) sucking in a bunch of broadcasts and spewing back Eigenradio. If you took a bunch of music and asked it, "Music, what are you, really?" you'd hear Eigenradio singing back at you. It's the computer's idea of what music really is.
posted April 17th by Jeff in art:: Bitfall
Bitfall is an installation where water is being used to project images taken from the internet. A computer observes various news websites and chooses thereafter the images to be displayed. 128 nozzles are controlled by synchronised magnetic valves, and the water drops falling to the ground shape the images. The visual information is only tangible for a second before the drops merge to become water again.
posted April 17th by Jeff in art:: Yahoo! Tracker
Online data graph that shows the most-emailed photos from Yahoo News almost in real-time
posted April 17th by Jeff in infoviz:: The Unseen Video
an intruiging weather-determined music video, which is dynamic & ever-changing as it is affected by the weather & local time from the position of the viewer.
posted April 17th by Jeff in art:: Net-Art Wrestling
Two web artists face-off in the wrestling ring to hack a web page live. The resulting changes are seen by the public on a screen and by web-surfers on the net. The match is the latest in a series of net-art wrestling matches staged by Mexican artist Arcangel Constantini.
posted April 17th by Jeff in art:: CYCLONE.SOC
The project maps textual conversation taken from the political and religious newsgroups to the isobars of a dynamic, interactive weather visualization of hurricanes - whose complex structures are used to visualize the conversational churn and eddies of the newsgroup conversations.
posted April 17th by Jeff in art:: More updates - Interactive Frank 2 coming soon
Some more updates, and new Switchboard documentation. At this point, I'm going to lock down the services and concentrate on fixing bugs. I made a slight change to the interface in 0.2.0.
With all of the changes I made, the old version of Interactive Frank 2.0 that I showed at the Symposium is pretty much useless. I'm basically starting from scratch, rebuilding it with the new Switchboard. But since most of the functionalist is now built into Switchboard, it should be a very quick process, as opposed to the weeks it took the first time around. I expect to be done by the end of next week, as I also have to do some documentation for my defense.
posted March 16th by jeff in switchboard:: Finalized Interface
I posted a new version of the library in which the method of sorting out results is a bit different. You can get it on the downloads page, and check out the changes in the changelog.
posted March 8th by jeff in switchboard:: XPath tutorial
I wrote a little XPath/XSLT tutorial for the first year "web stuff" class. It includes a cool little XPath console that I made for testing Switchboard. You can use XPath by creating a org.switchboard.util.Webpage and using the query() command.
posted March 6th by jeff in switchboard:: I Need Testers
I need examples for all of the functions on the documentation page and I don't have time to do them all. Specifically, I am interested in demos that focus on one service, but make use of more than one. Something along the lines of what they have in the Processing documentation. If you are interested in making some, please contact me at jeff [at] realtimeart [dot] com.
posted February 28th by jeff in switchboard:: Processing Bug
Apparently loadImage(URL) is broken in Processing, which is pretty much ruining my life right now, as I can't post any examples that use images. Hmm, am I going to have to contribute to the open source effort? Maybe the time has come. Although I seem to remember having problems with loading images form the web before - something about the loading happening asynchronously, so that, if you try to get the width and height of the image immediately after trying to load it, you get -1, -1. Perhaps there needs to be a wrapper that blocks until the loading is done.
posted February 27th by Jeff in switchboard:: Version 0.3 released
I put up a version of Switchboard in case anyone wants to play with it. For the most part, it works fine, but the myspace(), foaf(), and xfn() are just placeholders. Actually, the dictionary() and thesaurus() services are placeholders too, but if you want to use them, just use the Dictionary and Thesaurus classes in org.switchboard.util. If you have any suggestions for REST or SOAP services that you would like added, I've gotten pretty fast at adding them at this point, so just let me know.
posted February 27th by Jeff in switchboard
