From cosmology to calligraphy at Crystalpunk

Stumbled upon Crystalpunk today, a loose organisation and series of workshops under the socialfiction.org banner. In their words, the site "Socialfiction.org is a long-term research project that seeks to develop speculative knowledge that subverts ordinary ways to employ, experience and measure space, time and language.

The day to day reality of socialfiction.org is filled with projects. For most of them we encourage participation by persons known and unknown. Some of our projects are like whales, most are like plankton: the small ones feed the large ones."


Among the standouts, a Virtual raindrop installation by Tao Sambolec, a poem on e.coli bacteria, and the masks of Marcel Janco. General areas of continued interest seem to include the patterns and profundity of Go, Chinese calligraphy, bioengineering, and soft hardware. Where else could you find titles such as, "Quilts, Dreams and a Haunting by Cellular Automata".

Shadowy wiki editors unmasked with logo_wiki

Wayne Clements writes to let us know his wiki project, evolved as part of Window's online programme last year, continues with logo_wiki.

"logo_wiki identifies military, corporate, and governmental editors of Wikipedia ('the Free Encyclopedia'). It does this by tracing back the editor's IP address. logo_wiki shows recently edited 'diffs' pages (with changes highlighted) and shows who the shadowy editor is. logo_wiki does this by replacing the Wikipedia logo with the editor's logo. Military, corporate and governmental users are responsible for many thousands of unacknowledged alterations to Wikipedia pages. logo_wiki reveals this process occurring in real time."

Data visualisation: What does guilt look like?

In an age of information overload, a picture carries a thousand words - or stats. From around the net, political artists, environmentally savvy companies and concerned individuals are all making a statement, without uttering a word.


Hotmapping combines thermal imaging flyovers with residential mapping to uncover the highest energy hogs in any area. They recently completed a massive, 30 sq km section for Haringey in the UK, then posted it online, shaming the homeowners of those hot red dots on the map.

Radley Balko (stats) and Lee Laslo (programming) teamed up to reveal a pattern behind the numbers. Piecing together dozens of "isolated" botched police raids, the duo pinned them on a Google Map, complete with a key detailing items like "Death of an innocent", and case-by-case stories linked to local press articles. It's a textbook example of web 2.0 connectedness used for an incisive statement - stats+mapping+news articles - putting hyped but superficial initiatives like Twitter to shame.



Brazilian artist Icaro Doria takes national flags and rethinks them, mapping the area of a certain colour to damning statistics. Burkina Faso's tiny gold star becomes the percentage of children who actually reach maturity. Columbia's dominant yellow stripe representing it's cocaine production overshadows smaller crops like coffee and bananas. At best the stats are simplified. The EU's drastic oil production/consumption ratio is the result of many factors, many of which aren't necessarily negative. At worst, they're exaggerated or false - Somalia's shocking genital mutilation statistic would be difficult to get hard figures on.


Finally, Google's default inclusion of Darfur into it's Google Earth product is an overt political statement. It's 3d engine typically used to show corporate skyscrapers or monuments visualises something much more disturbing - tall purple towers representing numbers of displaced and wounded in the african nation.

Tracking the trackers: Unmasking wiki

Next month US based artist Wayne Clements will present a new variation of his un_wiki project specifically for Window. Clement’s Neutral 3 script filters through electronic encyclopedia Wikipedia’s recent pages log, ignoring hundreds of edits on boyfriends, tech trends, and local events, in search of something more sinister. The software contains a list of ‘shadowy editors’ – from defense departments in the US and Australia through to corporate giants like Deutsche Bank, Shell Oil and the Ford Motor Company.

Using tracing technology developed by Virgil Griffith, the artist is able to link the editor with the edited. Griffith created the software "to create minor public relations disasters for companies and organizations I dislike", and has so far succeeded. Australian Department of Defense staff are now banned from editing articles after it was discovered the department has made over 5000 edits. Dell, the American Rifle association, and both Democratic and Republican parties were also caught in the fallout, being linked to 'improving' articles that were potentially damaging.

Of course, Wikipedia "conflict of interest" policy is ineffectual and debateable. Who better to create that article on a new technology than the developer? The organiser of a local event is the perfect contributor for an wiki article on it. The problem lies in the potency of the information - from relatively harmless "graffiti" remarks on Helen Clarke's page, to rewrites of presidential administration history, and changes to crash articles by the airline responsible.

Visualising the future: Data as art

The medical professor smiles smugly at the new intern, unable to draw a conclusion from the long string of integers before him. "What's the matter", he questions, "can't see the pattern". He quickly draws a j-curve, signaling a medical emergency in the next few hours for the patient. What's true for the researchers in 1972's "Terminal Man" seems even more vital today. With the ability to generate so much data, how do we make decisions from it?

Tomar Sagi is building a business around one way. His software converts the thousands of hidden mail messages and contacts from Microsoft Outlook into tangible 3d environments - coloured cubes and blocks denoting what's important and what's not in a few seconds. Functional? For some. Beautiful? Definitely not.


A host of recent projects have attempted to prove that doesn't have to be the case. "Shape of Song" highlights the structure of music - from the repetitive hooks of Madonna's pop anthems to the complexity of masterpieces like Chopin's "Mazurka in F# Minor". Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar's piece, "We Feel Fine" extracts feelings from blogs with algorithms, then displays them as an exploded universe of painted spheres. As well as providing insight into the unseen, they mediate the complex world of information for us - cloaking thousands of lines of code and data in line, colour, and form.