[dorkbotsea-blabber] text tribe for PDSTWE4

[Eric McNeill]

I think you've hit upon the greatest challenge in this show, something
that's difficult for any kind of interactive art. How does anything that's
just a signal - be it some text, a light level, a sound, a button push, a
capacitance reading, a time of day or any other event - translate into "art"
at the single-piece level, and translate into "emergent communication" at
the network level?

It's very easy to make a button light up an LED, and not much more difficult
to make a button on one piece light up an LED on another piece. It's more
difficult to instill some higher-level meaning into those signals - that's a
challenge for each individual artist regardless of what other pieces they're
hooked up to. If none of the pieces are interesting on their own then the
collective whole probably won't be terribly interesting either. But if that
goal is met - and I think we have some very creative people involved with
this show - I'm hoping that the act of networking everything will produce
signals with a variety, intensity, duration, etc that perhaps the artists
didn't anticipate, and that the propagation of those signals throughout the
system will produce some interesting spatial/time effects.

So anyway, no buzz kill - I think you're just bringing up the point that
this stuff isn't easy. Who knows? Maybe this will need to be an annual thing
so we can continue to build on it.

Eric



On Sat, Feb 21, 2009 at 2:51 PM, James Buchanan <
jamesbuchanan1220 at comcast.net> wrote:

>  Hi Gang,
>
>   Sounds like a great idea, but my only question (and I don't want to
> sound like some guy being a buzz kill) how would this be illustrated as an
> art form that displays the concept of emergent communications?
>
>
>
> Would be happy to help.
>
>
>
> - James
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> *From:* dorkbotsea-blabber-bounces at dorkbot.org [mailto:
> dorkbotsea-blabber-bounces at dorkbot.org]*On Behalf Of *Joseph Gray
> *Sent:* Saturday, February 21, 2009 11:39 AM
> *To:* A discussion list for dorkbot-sea
> *Subject:* Re: [dorkbotsea-blabber] text tribe for PDSTWE4
>
>
>
> nice idea, I'd be into having an xml stream for control data for connecting
> art pieces together.
>
> Processing and Arduino seem like an ideal environment for this, for both
> sending and receiving data
>
>
>
>
>
> On Feb 21, 2009, at 10:43 AM, Eric McNeill wrote:
>
>
>
>  A few of us talked about doing a text-based tribe, using XML over an IP
> network to share any kind of text. I'm thinking pieces could do a sort of
> call and response, riffing off of each other's output.  It'd also be a good
> one for interaction over the internet - web crawling, Twitter, remote
> web-based interfaces, etc.
>
> I posted some ideas on the wiki:
>
> http://projects.dorkbot.org/dorkbot-wiki/TextTribe
>
> Let me know if you'd like to be a part of this.
>
> Eric
> eric [dot] mcneill [at] gmail
> ........................................................................
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