Daniel Cummerow has made various MIDI files (musical arrangements) that are generated by tapping into various areas of mathmatics. He’s producing the sound of maths. A fantastic idea. It also explains – to some extent – the multi-timbral soundscapes that Max Tundra produces.

Listen to an example of Daniel’s work, using Pascal’s Triangle. This is a MIDI file, most media players should be able to play it OK. Read about MIDI here.

I figured this was a cool example of how data meets art meets data.

I’d like to set up a feedback loop that is distributed among remote locations. For it to work I’ll need to have two computers, each equipped with a camera and an internet connection. The screen on computer 1, will show the live video feed (streamed through the net) from computer 2. The screen on computer 2, will show the live video from computer 1. The cameras attached to both computers would point at the screens.

Adding some kind of moving subject infront of either camera would possibly produce more interesting results.

It would be ideal to increase the number of computers in the chain. The more distributed (and global) the better. Degredation of quality, however, would probably ruin the image after a few iterations – though maybe it would actually create something really good.

I was talking to Sam – who plays in post-rock band Fridge – at mine and my sisters joint birthday party, at our parents house in Yorkshire. Unfortunately I was a little drunk, and so our conversation is now obscurred by a thin blanket of imparement, but I remember thinking it was great at the time. Inspite of the drunkeness I have retained some of what we talked about. One key point that came up is that a lot of my work utilises the network effect. Its silly really, I knew my work was using it, indeed using it was the point, but I hadn’t really thought about the network effect as an individual entity. More of a by-product. Pretty simply the network effect refers to how one good ‘user’ can have a positive effect on the system as a whole. I think it’s normally used in economics and business, it’s also a really good analagy for the so called ‘Web 2.0′ – something I wrote about a lot in my dissertation.

We also talked about the value of data and the power that it holds. Facebook, Digg, Delicious, MySpace; all gathering unimagineable quantites of data about their users. Amazon gathering precise statistics of how people use their services, in order to better tailor them toward people making purchases. For the big web players, it’s a data game and a numbers games. The data is the value, but its only valuable in numbers, but the numbers are there.

And what about thinking laterally about data. Below the surface there are often hidden depths. A little like Deep Thought concluding that “the answer” is 42; it makes sense, but only if you know what the question is. Data often seems to be relatively useless but if you ask it the right questions then it will come into focus. Sam mentioned a paper (that I think he wrote) whilst studying at Harvard. By specifying some, apparently strange, criteria the paper defined a way that you could identify the poorest economies in the world by using Google Earth.

I can’t remember what most of the criteria actually were, but they included things as seemingly random as ‘if the capital city’s governmental district has a high density of small blue patches in it’ and ‘if the capital city is obscurred by clouds’. The first suggests a poor economy because it signifies that high ranking government figures have swimmingpools, possibly indicative of corruption which is more commonplace in poor nations. The second point is because the satellite or plane that captures images for Google Earth will likely not return to recapture cloud obscurred pictures over the poorest nations.

It’s just very interesting to get underneath the ‘bonnet’ of data and to try and look at it in unusual ways. More on that later.

Artists are utilising the net as a medium for developing art projects, however these projects are often hard to find. The range of activity is extensive: artists use the net to experiment; to display and distribute their art projects; to collaborate; and sometimes to intervene critically in the increasingly commercialised and politicised space of the net.We intend to make these art projects more visible and accessible by seeking out key current projects and by encouraging artists to input information about their projects in low-fi’s open submission database.

http://www.low-fi.org.uk/

however these projects are often hard to find.

Unfortunately I only just found it! Still, interesting thing, seems to have been dormant for a while though.