Created by D3, digital production company based in Sao Paolo, ‘Circle of Trust’ shows your asymmetric relationship network at Google Plus.

Is there a way to visualize how each person is using and constructing this social environment?

The team wanted want to create a good real example of how the brand new Google+ API could be used. The project was inspired by Jack Byrnes, character of the movie Meet the Parents. Interpreting Jack’s theory, the team made a simple algorithm to visualize who are the people that are inside your circle of trust and who are the people out. In the visualizations the green are the people you have circled and they have circled you back, yellow is for people that you cared to circle but they didn’t, and red is for people that have circled you but you didn’t care to circle back.

Continue reading.... Circle of Trust [Javascript]

fbFacesis a project by Joern Roeder and Jonathan Pirnay that deals with the issue of data accessibility on the Internet. The project is a facebook crawler, built using JavaScript & PHP, that starts at the public profile of any fb-user, saving profile image, facebook-ID and name, and afterwards continuing its way to the public profiles of the user’s friends and so on. 100.000 of these profile images were used (via Processing) to print a wallpaper for an entire room.

fbFaces is an attempt to visualize the incredible amount of data and images that we are daily overwhelmed by, so that we can neither realize our own selectivity nor consider the amount of data perceived. The wallpaper transforms the room itself into a flood of information. It surrounds us, cannot be estimated from distance; details can only be caught through determined selection.…..What is normal, what is exaggerated? How are we dealing with that flood of information and in which way is it changing us? How important is image cultivation on the Internet and how important becomes my “facebook-me”? 

Joern Roeder and Jonathan Pirnay study “New Media” at the University of Visual Arts and Design Kassel, Germany – taught by Kim Asendorf.

CamBox is an iPhone app by Billaboop which allows you to create beatbox clips using iPhone’s built in video camera. Each sound you make triggers the recording of a short video sequence, which is stored into a box. You can then play the boxes with the touch screen and save it as a video. The jams can then be shared on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and more.

Platform: iPhone
Version: 1.0.1
Cost: 0.99
Developer:  Billaboop

Billaboop is a company by Amaury Hazan, a music technology and interaction enthusiast. Amaury obtained his PhD in audio signal processing, music cognition and machine learning at Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, home of the Reactable project. He has published several works in international conferences and journals and contributed to the success of recent mobile projects such as RjDj. Billaboop now collaborates with partners to bring mobile innovation to the larger audience.

Cascade is the latest project by NYTimes R&D department that allows precise analysis of the structures that underly sharing activity on the web. Initiated by Mark Hansen and working with Jer Thorp and Jake Porway (Data Scientist at the Times) the team spent the last 6 months building the tool to understand how information propagates through the social media space. While initially applied to New York Times stories and information, the tool and its underlying logic may be applied to any publisher or brand interested in understanding how its messages are shared.

The app is primarily an exploratory tool, Jer explains. NYTimes publishes more than 6,000 pieces of content every month, and the team can now analyse every sharing event involving this content using Cascade. Jer describes the basic app workflow:

- A ‘Story Mode’ which shows a set of stories, and their associated event cascades. These stories can be requested via keyword search, section search, or a variety of ‘interestingness’ metrics. This view has some low-level visualizations of activity over time which allow us to focus in on event cascades which might be particularly interesting.

- A ‘Cascade Mode’ which allows us to view the event cascades. The cascades build over time – one of the things we’ve been most interested in with this tool has the time-based analysis. Rather than seeing static views of the social graph, we can actually see the sharing networks unfold over time. This mode has three distinct views in which each cascade can be examined:
1) A ‘side view’ which shows all of the events over time, and uses the Y axis to indicate degrees of separation from the originating event
2) A ‘radar view’ which views the system from overhead and lets users identify ‘threads’ of conversation
3) A 3D ‘tree view’ which combines views 1 and 2

The tool is built in Processing, with a lot of help from Andres Colubri’s GLGraphics library and toxiclibs. It runs on any machine, but is staged on a 5-screen video wall. This ‘exhibition’ app runs in an automatic mode, in which it explores the terrain of available data and wanders through the various presentation modes. The wall can also be controlled by a custom iPhone app which is a fairly simple and sends OSC commands to the display system. The team considered using touch or gestural input to control the display but in the end this gave them the control they wanted while being able to use the interface at some distance from the screens.

All of the data is stored in a Mongo database, which they access through a Python API. They also used R quite a lot during the exploratory phases. The largest cascades they are currently loading have about 25,000 events. These are all rendered in 3D at full framerate (60fps) across 5 screens (6400×720) by a single machine. Jer suspects the system could handle trees of up to 50,000 events (all thanks to Andres & GLGraphics). The data that the team are currently using is a 2-week sample from July/August, but Jer says they will be moving to a near real-time data feed very soon.

The implementation used right now looks at the sharing of NYTimes content over Twitter but Jer explains that in fact Cascade is a system that could be used to model any kind of sharing activity. They’re already looking at implementing it for other Times properties (boston.com, etc. ) and will be testing it out on other sharing systems over the coming months.

If you would like to know more about the project, make sure you also check out Coverage on Project Cascade from Nieman Journalism Lab. Of course, there is also the Project Page at NYTLabs.

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Jer will be presenting latest work including Cascades at Resonate, new digital arts festival taking place later this year in Belgrade. Other confirmed speakers are available here + sign up to the newsletter for more info available soon. You can also follow on Twitter or join the group on Facebook.

SubMap is a project by Dániel Feles, Krisztián Gergely, Attila Bujdosó and Gáspár Hajdu at Kitchen Budapest. The project visualises and sonificates data pulled from one of the biggest news sites of Hungary, origo.hu.

One frame is one day, and on one day many things can happen. Depending on how many times a day the name of a city or a village is mentioned on the site, the map of Hungary dynamically distorts according to that number. The sound follows and sonfies that visual outcome, creating a generative ever changing drone.

The project developed from the idea to draw a subjective map of Budapest that represented their preferred places or memories in the city. As the places were recognised emotionally ‘closer’ to the team they would be enlarged where those of less importance would loose focus and become smaller. The team tracked their own locations by using foursquare.com and check-ins made in the application are translated into distorting forces applied to the map of Budapest.

Kitchen Budapest, opened in June 2007, is a new media lab for young researchers who are interested in the convergence of mobile communication, online communities and urban space and are passionate about creating experimental projects in cross-disciplinary teams.

Project Page

NewSpeak is a project created by Immo Blaese for anticensor, the 10th Web Biennial at the Istanbul Contemporary Art Museum. As new words are picked up every minute, NewSpeak will display the opposite meaning (antonym) based on an Orwellian scenario of doublespeak.

The creation of a new over simplified language to limit the expressions and thoughts possible in a dystopian totalitarian regime.

All images and tweets are loaded via public feeds provided by Flickr and Twitter. The full project including screensavers for Mac and Windows can be downloaded here.

Play > newspeak.zonkzone.net

Print Stuff is a personal project by Guido Tamino allowing strangers to use his printer at home forming basis of what will eventually become a book. Basically he is inviting everyone to print some stuff (a short message and a picture) in his room over the internet, it’s real time and fully automated. Just fill in the form and click «print». There’s also a webcam video stream in the background so that you can see the priting process actually happening.

The process uses shell scrip for printing and uploading part, PHP for the general queue handling (together with a pdf class for formatting everything right) and a simple Pure Data patch for snapping webcam pictures and uploading them to the server.

The website has been opened to the internet only a couple hours ago so if you want to be the first, it’s only few clicks away..here.

Looking at my printer sending out some stuff picked by strangers on the internet becomes addictive in a short time. There is some mistery behind that, which is exciting and makes the printing process an extremely pleasant thing to look at, because you never know what to expect. And if i like this experience maybe someone else will do, that’s why I am starting to share with everyone on the internet a live streaming of my printer.

More info can be found on his blog.

printstuff.personalreport.it

Created by Matt West, Collaborative Instrument is a music instrument that requires two people to play: one to control the pitch and the other to control the rhythm.

Rather than attempting to engineer together mechanisms and parts of existing instruments, such as a keyboard, I’m using simple electronics to divide the two basic functions mentioned above. Then I’ll design the casing, intending to extend the division of the two functions and experiment with how both musicians communicate with one another.

Early prototype videos below.

During his final year at Goldsmiths, University of London studying BA design, Matt designed objects that encourage musicians to aim for and achieve the small steps towards perfection by producing instruments that physically train, force collaboration and demand creativity. This work comes from a dissatisfaction with his own musical ability and commitment to rehearsing. Matt likes to work with objects, graphics and even food, with all projects stemming from personal interest, excitement and intrigue. (source)

(via psfk)

Devices For Mindless Communication is a collection of projects by Gerard Rallo, a researcher, technologist, designer and a recent graduate of MA in Design Interactions from the Royal College of Art. His work explores speculative roles of technology to interrogate social implications of progress.

With new technologies as an important driver, certain real life interactions are falling into disuse for large segments of society.
As a result, we see a mix of social groups with radically different values, social skills, perceptions, and ways of engaging the real world and its inhabitants. With this set up, these projects explore how we interact with each other, and speculate about alternative roles of technology, those mediating the most mundane communication practices in shared physical spaces. Practice, based on near future projections of current behavioral and technological trends, as an exercise of reflection on how bizarre our fundamental communication practices and basic assumptions might be seen when looked at from another perspective.

Gerard Rallo, together with Andrew Frien, Sitraka Rakotoniaina also graduates from Royal College of Art, constitute Studio Good One collective, a practice that embraces conceptual design, graphic design, interactive design, exhibition and space design, and the points at which they may converge. studiogoodone.com

photo above by ha++

Conversation Challenger

The possible success of conversational technologies with access to all-knowledgeable semantic networks might lead to a massive disinterest in regular human beings. This device listens to one half of a conversation, and competes for your attention with related content streamed from the net. It allows you to choose where to direct your attention; towards the speaker, or the device. In this situation, the individual speaking does his or her best to pull attention away from the device and back to themselves, but is it really possible for someone be more interesting than everything else?

Project Page

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Personal Adviser For Reintegration

Sporadic, banal conversations with no aim behind them are at risk of disappearing, no longer a learned or common behavior of future generations. This device tracks conversations, giving hints about open questions, accepted comments, answers, and expressions.
It brings the awkward pleasure of small talk back to those who no longer interact with others for no reason.

Project Page

photo above by ha++

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Reiterative Communication Aid

Most of the conversations we have through our life are redundant. This fact clashes with modern praise of time efficiency and real time data consumption. This device tracks conversations you have throughout your entire life, analysing your patterns of communication. Eventually, when a repeated pattern is detected, the device is able to replace you in that conversation, allowing you a freedom to explore anything and everything else.

Project Page

photo above by ha++

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Expressions Dispatcher

Many decisions made in our everyday lives are influenced by expert advice, from hairstyles to insurance policies. Yet, millions of decisions are made on a daily basis and instantly expressed through our own facial expressions without any preconceived external reassurance. We continuously strive to project a desired physical self image of ourselves, sometimes requiring most of our cognitive resources, and paradoxically, this daily challenge has a big impact on our lives. Expressions Dispatcher is designed to help people in their quest for expressiveness.

Project Page

photos above by ha++