Well after eventually catching up on the units I was behind with, it’s now full steam ahead on the thesis project. I had a very helpful crit a few weeks back with Joel Gethin Lewis, and from the discussion it became apparent that Twitter could be used to develop the automated, internet-based dimension of the project. I understand from Joel that the Twitter API is fairly intuitive, allowing reasonably straightforward development of plug-in type thingies. Of course for someone like myself with very little coding experience this may not be entirely the case, but I’ll give it a go nonetheless.
I will also be looking at Ruby, “A dynamic, open source programming language with a focus on simplicity and productivity. It has an elegant syntax that is natural to read and easy to write.” (like the sound of that!) as a way of coding the piece of software I have in mind.
Just to recap on a previous post, the idea is to be able to take data (video, audio, image, text) from a number of users over the web, and digitally decay this in some way. The results would be incorporated into a live feed as part of a physical projection installation. What is even more interesting is that Twitter throws up the possibility of a two-way communication between the user and the system. Users may ‘Twit’ data which is decayed and sent back to them. It may become an amalgamation, a miss-match between their own data and another users. What if the returned data could then be re-twitted, over and over again?
I am now reminded again of a precedent I came across in the early days of this project, fuba_recorder (see earlier post). It describes itself as “I am a robot for generating abstract-images of Japanese TV programs requested by my followers”. I really would love to know if the process of finding the images and mashing them together into those beautiful montages is actually automated, or if there is a bloke sitting on Google/Photoshop. I’ll presume it’s the former thought until I’m told otherwise.
In this case, although essentially the process is no different to any other computer process (where a user inputs a series of commands and the computer generates the result), with the fuba_recorder there seems to be something unique and far more poetic than what is generally expected from a computer. I am captivated by the thought of this ‘robot’ scouring through Google Images, looking for a screenshot of a certain character that has been requested by its commander.
Anyway, there is a lot to learn in a little time so I must get on!
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