Social Media Predictors

Who is winning on the internet right now?

Let's say you watch a video on YouTube. You're the 500th viewer, and later that day it explodes to 100k views. This gives you a score of 500/100000 = .005. The next day you watch a video, you're the 500th viewer, but the video never goes beyond 1k views. So your score that day is 500/1000 = .5. Your average score is (.005 + .5) / 2 = ~.25.

Let's say the person with the lowest score is winning. Unfortunately, the only institution that's really in a position to calculate this score is Google.

Gaze-informed Perceptual Compression

A video chat program that tracks your eye movement and sends gaze information to the other user. The other user's computer compresses the entire image heavily, with the exception of what you're looking at. To you, it just looks like the entire image is clear.

Piece for HTTP

1. Post a link to a website online, but remove one of the Ts from "http" so it becomes "htp".
2. When this link is clicked, the participant will be forced by their browser to pause for a moment and reflect on the syntax of URL, adding the missing "t" by hand

Empty Art for the Web

A web-enabled computer in a gallery, allowing visitors to browse the internet. A ready-made the information age.

Google Earth Live

"Google Earth Live" is a hypothetical service offered by Google in the not-to-distant future. It is predicated upon Google releasing a matrix of satellites into orbit that regularly poll large sections of the Earth at high resolution, and offering this data for free via the Google Earth interface.

When this is available, how would you use it (practically)? And what sort of art would you make with it?

The obvious: make timelapse videos of yourself as you go throughout your day, from the perspective of the satellite.

I Am Sitting in a Google Ad

Set up simple web page with only the text of Alvin Lucier's famous composition, and Google text ads.

Visit the page, and take note of the Google text ads. Create a copy of the page, replacing Lucier's text with the text from the ads. Repeat this process indefinitely, or until Google starts repeating itself.

Flash Mob 3D Scanning

1. Pick a local monument.
2. Organize a flash mob via Craigslist.
3. Instruct everyone to take photos of the monument.
4. Everyone then uploads and tags their photos.
5. These photos are then uploaded to Photosynth for 3D reconstruction.

As a variant, people can just record video and walk around. This relies on the videos being high resolution.

Full Inbox

As of this moment, Gmail offers 7365 MB of storage. To me, 7365 MB looks like an open desert, or a desolate sea. I want to fill that up, or at least craft it. What would email land art look like? What is the architecture of an empty inbox? And how can it be shaped toward an aesthetic or conceptual goal?

Email To Real Mail Converter

I like this idea for an iPhone app, "Shoot It". You take a picture on your iPhone, and they print it out and send it as a postcard for you.

My favorite part is that this is an "algorithm" that involves both automated and non-automated actions. There are real people involved in pushing a postcard around. I'd like to start a service that send letters for you. You would send an email to a specific address, include a mailing address, and we would print out and mail the letter for you.

This service actually exists in reverse for older folks that don't want to deal with the internet. They can have a service print out emails for them, and send out their handwritten letters as emails.

Crowdsourcing Glitches

I'm interested in the possibility of destroying data through natural processes. I've already explored this a bit with Future Fragments, where quotes from friends were carried in their pockets and destroyed over the period of a summer.

Another interesting system that naturally destroys information over time is the human mind (memory). Consider the possibility of crowdsourcing distortion: for example, with Mechanical Turk, create a task that plays a subset of a song that the worker is then asked to repeat. These responses are then averaged to create an approximation of the original tune.

This task takes advantage of our ability to hear melodies. We can also treat the mind as a more generic digital signal processor: ask each worker to recall the midi pitches of each note. Or better: portions of the mp3 encoded audio in hex. Besides the auditory system, we can also take advantage of the visual system. Ask each worker to recall and draw the audio signal (at a sufficient scale).

These tasks would be especially interesting in the case of people like Ben Pridmore, who is able to quickly memorize large amounts of data (e.g.: 364 playing cards in 10 minutes). I imagine his memory slowly degrades. It'd be great to see what a compressed image looks like that is memorized slightly incorrectly, and watch it degrade over time.

Privacy Art

Whenever you point your browser to an https page, or type your password into a box with asterisks instead of clear text, or see a small lock icon next to a form, you get a feeling of security. In these situations, a language of reassurance has evolved: lock icons, for example, tend to be golden-yellow or blue-gray. Unlike other icons, which are free to be multi-colored, locks have a restricted palette that has evolved to remind us of the physical objects, "real locks", that we trust from day to day. I propose work that takes advantage of these features in the collective net-unconscious. For example: an https website that promises to keep your data secure, while requesting only random pieces of banal information.

Snail Mail Machine

I propose a machine for fueling the enduring nostalgia associated with paper envelopes. It will sit next to your computer, and every time you receive an email it will drop a real envelope through a small slot. Every envelope will have your name on it.

It's essential to keep the technology as invisible as possible. It should not be complicated by a printer that prints the name of the sender on the envelope, for example. The idea is that someone has just dropped off a letter by your computer for you to read.

When you remove the envelope from its holder (or, perhaps, place it back inside the machine) a window should pop up on your computer that shows you the email.

Indirect Indirection

Along the lines of Kopyfamo' (or at least sharing the aesthetic): use the various "this is a hosted image" images as profile/avatar images. Alternatively, collect these images and upload them to various image hosting sites. For example (Hosted on tinypic.com):

Piece for Internet

Click on every advertisement you see.

Piece for Anonymous

Next time you come across a personal blog of someone you've never met, bookmark it and check it frequently. Do your best to understand where the person is coming from, and leave thoughtful comments. Do this without letting it become creepy.

Piece for DNS

1. Register the shortest possible domain name you can.

Potential additional constraints:

• You are limited to the .com top level domain.
• Domain names may include a-z, 0-9 and the hyphen, must start with a-z and may not end with a hyphen. (See RFC 1034)
• Get kicked out of domaintools.com's bulk check:

  Security : Client may be too resource intensive. You have reached your daily lookup limit.

From-To

Half-formed instruction piece using directions from Google Maps.

• In the form of images (paths) or as text (directions).
• Cities might be chosen at random or based on some principle.

Principles:

• Only very small cities.
• Only capitols.
• Cities with the same name.
• Cities with some other shared characteristic: crime rate, population, longitude...

Presented as prints or on a screen/projection, rotating through possibilities. These things make me think about how we can get from one place to another, and the ways in which we connect things in time, space, and using other labels.

Slow Motion via Bandwidth Throttling

Create a film meant to be viewed in slow motion. Stream it across a connection that is throttled at exactly the right bandwidth so the video plays in slow motion. Alternatively: add an element of interactivity by creating a force-sensitive sheath for the network cable running to the display computer. When a participant steps on the sheath, the bandwidth is further throttled — "choking" the network connection. Instead of creating a video, consider using YouTube videos. Every time a video loads completely, choose a new one at random.

Bring the Noise

1. Pick a YouTube video.
2. Train a Markov chain on the comments.
3. Generate a new comment with the Markov chain.
4. Post that comment to the video.
5. Pick a new YouTube video and repeat.

Piece for Facebook

1. Register a Facebook account.
2. Friend request only your real-life best friend.
3. Confirm every person who sends you a friend request.
4. That real-life best friend is not allowed to answer your request.