An installation exploring our new technological symbiosis
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Thesis Swarm
Thesis proposal:
In the age of the knowledge economy we are thrust into a time in history that no known civilisation before has encountered. Our institutional knowledge as a species grows and is documented everyday via the world wide web. Our ability to classify and store information is increasing, and because of the sheer amount of information, we are increasingly devising new ways to display and classify it. Some recent innovations include tag clouds, wikis, swarms, folksonomies, and metadata.
How can interface with this new data in a way that we haven’t before? Are there elements from the history of our species that can be drawn on to inspire new ways of knowledge transfer? What are the most efficient methods biological of data transfer?
Related links (Wikipedia):
| 10001 | k | kilo- |
| 10002 | M | mega- |
| 10003 | G | giga- |
| 10004 | T | tera- |
| 10005 | P | peta- |
| 10006 | E | exa- |
| 10007 | Z | zetta- |
| 10008 | Y | yotta- |
Discussion
4 comments for “Thesis Swarm”
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© 2008 The Technological Red Zone. 
lev manovich gave a talk at ISEA about this very topic. it reached a strange pinnacle as he decreed the new wave of creativity to be largely at the hands of carefully tweaked bots and processes to ascertain and otherwise visualize the data you are speaking of. i say strange, because he was addressing a room full of artists who are striving (for the most part) to wrestle this data to the ground, and either plant a flag of self-aggrandizement, or social-concern square in the center. at one point lev even said that a museum is a room full of garbage with some form of signage attached to it. i counter all of these arguments with something that might be an unsuspecting angle; rather than the humanist backlash, i like to point out that the human mind is like a computer. not like the one i am typing on now per se, but it is a biological data processor. so, all of these people leading up to this increasingly data-rich age were like evolution and culture programmed information visualizers. the visualization Michaelangelo had to set about was a careful balance of politics, religion, his own (apparently tumultuous) emotions, his financiers, etc.
so, reeling this digression back in - i’m wondering what all of the data aggregators are going to do for meaning-making. processing data is nothing new; rendering the resplendent details of the analog to the digital IS new. are we going to just end up with a bunch of proce55ing inspired visualizations - an aestheticizing of data?
what does a data cloud tell us other than a very thin slice of the mind-processes wrapped up in my (or the delicious collective) ideas, creativity, feelings and emotions. not that i am against using this technology - i think it is very useful. i’m just wary of the manovich’s of the world who view this as a potential end-product for art and design, knocking the statues in the museum off of their pedestals.
This is good food for thought. I heard this great story about a young girl in Africa who’s family was bought a goat. As a result of this she ended up at Harvard and ended up with a Masters in law. Perhaps it all comes back to tools. If the tools are there, and there is difference, the ‘human spark’ will both use and abuse. The goat and the bots are tools. Will we end up in a statistically unlikely place because of this? Thinking in colour.
ha! that is a great story. did that happen or is that some sort of urban(internet) legend? But, coming back to tools. You are right. Tools are tools, it’ how we use them…
No it actually happened! Although some of the details were exaggerated - eg. Harvard. Link to story is here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/03/opinion/03kristof.html