the following installations are also based on the idea of turning virtual data into real entities or events. but in these examples it is, in contrast to the digital waterfall, the other way round, not water in the air but air in water what represents the digital information.
the first bubble screen is the information percolator which is some sort of ambient display. here the bubbles are released in one of the 32 vertical tubes what makes it possible to create different images. but especially these dominant tubes somehow disturb the clarity of the display.
another artist who is creating bubble displays is stephanie andrews. she invented the bubble screen the thinktank and lifeblood within the years 2001 and 2002. she also intends to visualize digital data but somehow obtains no real control of the bubbles, which leads to nice looking patterns but still no traceable connection between the human interaction and the effect on the visualization.
beta tank also called their piece of work “bubble screen”. it precisely emits smaller and uniform bubbles but in the end, or at least in this video, the information is somehow hard to read.
this shows that it only makes sense to show clear informations on a display with a sufficient resolution, not to prove the weakness of the device. whereas vague displays, like the early bubble installations, always allow the designer to add the same blurriness of the source onto the visualization. as a result the display doesn’t try to communicate informations it could never produce.
greyworld adopted the idea of the raising information bits and created the installation the source in the london stock exchange.