I’ve just had the great pleasure of being a juror for the art exhibition BioLogic: A Natural History of Digital Life at this year’s SIGGRAPH in New Orleans.

Applying scientific methodology like peer-reviewing to something as subjective as art was definitely an interesting experience, with all the good and bad things that come with democracy. I’m sure that we’ve managed to put together a great show that will be much unlike the previous ones and intriguing for a wide range of people. Many thanks to Elona Van Gent, who’s the chair of the show for the invitation and to the other jurors for making this so pleasant.

The term ’social collider’ mapped just after launch…

The Social Collider reveals cross-connections between conversations on Twitter.

With the Internet’s promise of instant and absolute connectedness, two things appear to be curiously underrepresented: both temporal and lateral perspective of our data-trails. Yet, the amount of data we are constantly producing provides a whole world of contexts, many of which can reveal astonishing relationships if only looked at through time.

…and the same search term 16 hours later

This experiment explores these possibilities by starting with messages on the microblogging-platform Twitter. One can search for usernames or topics, which are tracked through time and visualized much like the way a particle collider draws pictures of subatomic matter. Posts that didn’t resonate with anyone just connect to the next item in the stream. The ones that did, however, spin off and horizontally link to users or topics who relate to them, either directly or in terms of their content.

The Social Collider acts as a metaphorical instrument which can be used to make visible how memes get created and how they propagate. Ideally, it might catch the Zeitgeist at work.

Give it a go at http://socialcollider.net and follow @socialcollider on Twitter for updates. There’s also a Flickr-pool for your screenshots. Happy colliding!

Stuart Candy is a multimedia futurist at the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies in Honolulu and the first Research Fellow of the Long Now Foundation in San Francisco. A pioneer in so-called “guerrilla futures”, both his widely read blog the sceptical futuryst and his PhD research at the University of Hawaii at Manoa are about the communication of foresight through the design of future-evoking situations and artifacts. In 02006, with colleague Jake Dunagan (now at the Institute for the Future), he started FoundFutures, a public art initiative devoted to making future scenarios experientially available in everyday life. Late last year, Stuart served as Game Master for the world’s first massively multiplayer forecasting game, “Superstruct”, and he is currently leading development of a public alternate reality game about pandemic influenza hitting Hawaii.

March 16th at Demos, 19h. Free but limited capacity, please RSVP on Meetup

The truly interesting (and unexpected) moment for this project was when we put the objects outside to take photos for the documentation. On the pictures, the objects give a bizarre, almost photoshop-like impression, which we attributed to the fact that they had been modeled after a real object. Now they somewhat visually collided with their origins and produce the mentioned effect. In fact it was so strong that some didn’t believe they were physical objects at all when captured on a photo.

Unintentionally, we applied a similar technique as the artist and photographer Thomas Demand, who takes photos (mostly with historic background but somewhat lesser-known), recreates the scene in paper and takes a photo again which becomes his artwork. However, there is a significantly different twist to our result, which is that it also reflects on the way that virtual environments like games or any kind of simulation imitates physical reality, in this case to the point where some even feel uncomfortable.

Julian Bleecker added a whole new perspective to that when he remarked that these photos are somewhere uncannily “between heaven and hell” for him, and that especially the compression artifacts on some of the textures, which make it thinkable that one day even what we consider to be real might become subject of the paradigms of the digital in such ways that effects like this might appear. Another interesting idea from Julian and his colleagues at Nokia was that of our project as a magnifying glass for data, since the models we extracted were initially impossibly small.

More along the lines of the collision of real and virtual, in terms of aesthetics, were some of our ideas for our talk. It somewhat appears as if there is an increasingly lively interchange between the realms of the simulated and the simulation which has a noticeable effect on how objects are designed or portrayed. A great example would be BMW’s recent M8 Hommage Car, which by a friend on first glance was mistaken for an exported object from Second Life. Another example is the BBC’s Igglepiggle show, which for me was in fact one of the first media products to give me a hard time in figuring out whether it was computer animated footage or live action video. It turned out to be the latter, but resulted in five minutes of uncertainty and was only confirmed by the Daily Mail.

Inversely, there’s games which portray reality at an unprecedented scale, both technically and in terms of their financial success versus the film industry. I recently saw GTA4 for the first time and, especially currently living in an American urban environment, was very much amazed by the richness of the texture in the simulation. For me, the same applied to the recent Batman-movie The Dark Knight, in which the effects on Aaron Eckhart’s Two-Face were done in such a way, that it in a sense leapfrogged realism and almost came closer to the original comic character while still being a cinematographic representation.

Linda and I will be talking about Export to World at this year’s reboot in Copenhagen. Wooo, looking forward to meet everyone! Probably happening on Thursday, best watch the schedule of day 1.

Update: it’s at 19h in the small hall, that’s the first evening-session after dinner.

There’s a short interview about Export to World in GEE, a German magazine about gaming and culture.

This photo has been selected for the third The Average Home, which kicks off tomorrow night on windows in Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, Milan, New York, Tel Aviv, Tokyo and Wrocław.

Many thanks to Arne & Katharina!

http://www.exporttoworld.net

Now online: documentation and DIY-materials from our project at the recent Ars Electronica in Linz–a workshop aiming to copy objects from Second Life’s walled economy of simulated things by transforming them into life-size papercraft models.