sport4minus.de

Tim and me are mainly interested in quickly changing data as a source, so we are focusing on datastreams.

the term stream itself derives from the physical world and lets us think of water, air, sand, moving particles in general.

today, datastreams are everywhere. flickr, rss, delicious, webradio, youtube, iptv, you name it.
since no one can really perceive all that data, visualizing the sheer mass of information in an aesthetic way would be the way to go.

here are some ideas:

“pixel sand”

there are many feeds supplying us with tons of photos, or movies from every part of the world, shot by any person.
flickr and livejournal are the platforms.

we’d like to be at the end of the stream, transforming it into a physical form. regarding pixels as particles, we’d like to pile them up in the real world. a software would monitor the flickr stream for a certain tag, or for the whole flickr platform, read out the pixel values and drop a portion of colored sand in relation to each pixel of an image. on a large pile, or on a moving ground, both are possible, the difference is in the amount of readablity.

“audiostreams”

filtering out radio frequencies from the air or from the internet, we could:

make a sound object out of the waveforms

print the waveforms on endless paper rolls, creating a tentacle-like organic creature, maybe composed from autonomous units.

read out the playlists, look the lyrics up on the internet, print the lyrics on paper.

visualize the amplitude of a lot of streams simultaneously, for example with LEDs looking like outlets at the end of Audiocables.

“stream as a thread”

if we regard the datastream as a thread, on a certain point, a regular thread could be applied with color or varied in thickness, before being coiled up. as in regular streams, one can see only one point, the rest fades in the past. also the way the thread is coiled up can vary, so the form on the coil itself is subject to change.