in this issue of wired (16.03), there is a big feature of data art. on this occasion wired.com presents my project textour in an online feature called “frame that spam! data-crunching artists transform the world of information”.
many thanks to tim mckeough and heather bourbeau.
according to joseph weizenbaum, a computer pioneer and later on a critic, the internet is just a dunghill that contains some sporadical valuable pearls. although this statement sounds cynical it seems to be true, being the fact that search engines and bookmarks appear to be the most popular tools to somehow locate informations. this points out that there is actually no other way to navigate through the unstructured content of the internet where, in addition to that, more and more pages are constantly created and, as a result, the chaos continues to grow.
but what makes the internet so obscure? in my opinion, first of all, the fact that it lacks to properly display the location of an information source in space and time. as a result, all the sites are places on the same unidentified space and the two essential orientation properties for navigation are eliminated. furtermore we are used to design static content, like in printed papers, with no actual interaction or networking possibilities and find it to be difficult to develop new concepts.
but referring to this i see the structure of a blog, with its reverse chronological order of the posts or the way the information is fed as a rss-stream to an application, as a starting point to create new templates of information management.