What is knowledge? What is poetic knowledge? Is it the surrealist conjunction of contradictions or perceptually distant modalities?
Meanderings is a list of links derived from a six month scrutiny(Nov., 2006-July 19th, 2007) of a myriad of websites converging but not confined to the topic of digital text but not confined to that topic. It is currently an html based single page site, done with free commercial blogging software (blogger and scribefire) that permits rapid highlighting of text and right mouse instant posting. The criteria for inclusion on the list is twofold: did I like it or it is an essential aspect of research into digital poetics. The html will be replaced in June by a Flash interface which revisualizes the list of links into a searchable evolving animated space, where the software code continually sorts and redisplays the data in order to playback a simulation [Baudrillard] of ‘thought’. In contemporary web terminology, it is a mashup where « information and presentation are being separated in ways that allow for novel forms of reuse. » Sho Kuwamoto.
In order to create the Meanderings mashup, I considered what is thought? Thought at a generic level is comparison and contrast in order to determing what’s similar and whats not. From this foundational analysis, an action arises. In the context of the Meanderings, website, the results of these rudimentary comparisons provoke switches between modes of display. Items flock together based on similar characteristics, but the criteria for similarity changes over time, so flocks are temporary. This gives the entire biomass of data a volatile living quality.
This research into visualization of large datasets is endebted and informed by a website I created for Ollivier Dyens in 2004 for his ContinentX project. ContinentX is 3d visualization of a large database of quotations Ollivier collected during the course of his PhD research from new media criticism and literature. He wanted to explore alternative vieing modalities. His inventive mind resulted in a website that attempts to model a visual ecosystem of ideas. Themes and keywords have been hard-coded into the database; these themes are used to draw connections between ; similarily in Meanderings, the tag system (called ‘Labels’) are hand-coded. Meanderings extends this research by automating the search for thematic similarities; the software automatically searches each post, doing comparative analysis on the basis of word content, length, phrase similarity, tags, etc…Meanderings also plays itself, it does not depend unpon the user to activate change. It therefore exists as a hybrid object, both interactively responsive to user choices and independently capable of functioning without any user intervention.
A project that parallels and anticipates this style of computational remix is Jason Lewis 2001 project » ‘I Know What You’re Thinking’ trolls the host machine’s hard drive(s) for all the text (.txt) and Eudora/Outlook mailboxes (.mbx) it can find. It then writes random chunks of text from these various files to the screen, in five streams. Each stream has its own particular appearance, and varies in size and on-screen duration, creating a motion collage of different layers of semi-transparent text. The result is a disconcertingly intimate and schizophrenically lyrical look into your activities on that machine. »
Another example of a mashup is Gregory Chatonsky’s 2007 website « L’Attente, the waiting / Flussgeist 1″ which streams text from twitter (an online sms networking service that offers realtime update to social networks) into a web2.0 Flash interface that draws photos from Flickr and dynamically displays the results over video shot in a train station of people waiting for a train. What emerges is a generative fiction, an ‘infinite video’ [from the meta tags in the page source] that is an assemblage of tightly controlled material (the video) and external material (twitter and flickr).
The boundaries of the art-object in this context become porous to external reality. The sacroscanct centre of the created product is replaced with the fluid context of an ongoing process. The weakness of these approaches is that the material is often not all of the same quality, leading to a sense of sporadic interest. Yet the future of literature will certainly involve autonomous software agents who search and scrutinize the web constantly updating material and foraging for new forms of display.
The art work as construct of software has a living legacy that extends back to Babbage and Ada Lovelace, and beyond them into alchemists like Raymond Llul [Cramer, 2000].
The evolutionary inevitability is that literature will develop new forms to fit the emerging ecosystems of computation.
http://www.year01.com/jhave/SIAT_blog/biomedical/2007/04/meanderings-mashup.html
[...] Mashup est sans doute une expression des expressions de cette forme d’open source. Il consiste en la [...]