Party at the Center of the Universe to Silence of The Lands

Party PicThe Party at the Center of the Universe is an attempt at using data generated by the public to generate a spatial construct on the internet. This spatial construct takes into consideration the user’s position in space, orientation in space and identity. Each of these factors will affect the way a person is represented in the constructed space. A user’s position is determined by reading the strength of their wireless network connection. A user’s orientation is determined by reading the values of the accelerometer (Sudden Motion Sensor) built in to their laptop. A user’s identity is determined by reading the username of the user currently logged on to the laptop. The readings are made by a downloadable Dashboard widget and does not depend on the user’s concious interaction. It runs in the background, transmitting the necessary information to the party at 5 second intervals. It does not interfere with normal use of the computer and the user is free to shutdown the widget at any time if they wish.

Hubbles law describes how every point in space sees itself as the center of the Universe. Due to an effect similar to the Doppler effect experienced when an ambulance speeds past, the Universe appears to be expanding away from every point in space, in all directions. So a space that has the potential to be a single locative indicator of every point in space, must be the embodiment of the Center of the Universe… and we’re throwing a party! BYOB, good company and music is provided.

The client only works on Mac laptops at the moment but anyone can observe the infinitely expanding, curved spacetime of the Center of the Universe.

Click on their audio link and you get a soundtrack that I assume is generated by the data. I hope it is anyway. Also you need to have Java loaded to be able to see the link.

And heading to the other end of the spectrum, this is a weird one I noticed at “We make Money Not Art”. But it justifies ( vaguely) you going out and getting some new toys. Or it will when they get it going.

Silence of the Lands – Community of Soundscapes enables you to annotate and map the soundscape of urban and natural environments.

Participants can record and collect ambient sounds, create and share individual and collective cartographies, and use them as conversation pieces of a social dialogue on natural quiet. The result is a pervasive museum in which natural quiet is transformed into a living and affective geography that changes over time according to participants’ perceptions and interpretations of their environmental setting.

Ambient sounds are collected using a PDA. The sounds are linked to the person that collected them, and associated to GPS data.

The sounds are then stored in a database, visualized on a GIS map, and made available for audio-streaming in the web community as individual soundscapes. Participants can access, manage, and eventually modify their own individual soundscapes, associating to them several descriptors.
Participants can interact with the collective soundscape. By playing with physical objects in an interactive environment, participants are encouraged to interpret the collective soundscape and create an idealized, virtual one.

Hmm. GPS, audio recording PDA, projector ( to view the landscapes in there correct proportions). Toy junkies? Don’t see many of those around here.

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Categorized as Mondays

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