Artists: Representations of Networks

Here's a small research on examples of representations of networks. Some are social based, others or not.

Networks representations

Just to Re-Cap Brendal Laurel

-Aristotle identified 6 qualitative elements of drama and suggested the relationship among them as formal and material causalities of one another.

- Drama "automagically" reveals the ways in which things should work or how they have gone awry

- Human-computer interactivity can be described with a similar model, with equal utitly in both design and analysis

Element
Action
Character
Thought
Language
Melody [Pattern]
Spectacle [Enactment]

Allen Kay vs. Danny Hillis

This article was posted in a January 2004 issue. Allen Kay and Danny Hillis sit together in a room and "talk"

Alan Kay was one of the first to think about personal computing and graphical user interface [double clicking etc...]

Danny Hillis, who studied at MIT, is the co-founder and chief scientist of Thinking Machines, a supercomputer company designed, in part, to create the sort of machine that Hillis was thinking about when he said, "I want to design a computer that will be proud of me."

Link to the Interview

Ants (???)

Couple of great resources about ants:

1. http://home.att.net/~B-P.TRUSCIO/STRANGER.htm
2. http://ant.edb.miyakyo-u.ac.jp/INTRODUCTION/Gakken79E/Page_02.html

Interesting research from MIT about interactions of individuals inside a community of robots, inspired from the ant colony.
http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/ants/

Droog design

Droog design is a group of designers that engage and examine existing materials with the goal of creating a practical, simple object through a revelatory and inspirational creative concept. Their objects can be witty or politically subversive or neither, and yet the process of creating it never ceases to offer sharp commentary on how humans interact with each other and our environment.

Droog = ‘Dry’ as in dry wit, unadorned informality, ascetic irony. ‘Dry’ as that essentially Dutch inclination to ‘do normal’ and at the same time critically investigate what you’re doing and the way you do it. A curatorial collection that became a brand with an attitude.
(Renny Ramakers, Director, Droog design )

http://www.droogdesign.nl/

droog design in the milan furniture fair 2003

Ontology

• A specification of a conceptualization.
• Representation of a set of concepts and the relationships between them.
• A form of knowledge representation about the world or some part of it.
• Ontology (in computer science) describes: individuals, class, attributes, relations

Using computers – reading highlights

The next lines will be my favorite and more interesting sentences and ideas from the text:” Using computers. A direction for Design ” By terry Winograd & Fernando Flores.

• “The most important designing is ontological…”
• “…affecting the kind of beings that we are.”
• “…looking backwards to the tradition that has formed us but also forward to as-yet-uncreated transformation…”
• Interfering with the background of our heritage.
• What is it, to be human?
• Essence of communication: what is user friendly?, Transparency of interaction, User domains, Breakdowns – problems .
• Technology leads to transformations.
• Creating new framework of actions – leads to better domains of interpretation
• “…we are doing more than asking what can be built.”
• “we are engaging in a philosophical discourse about the self – about what we can do and what we can be...”
• “… continuing evolution of how we understand our surroundings and ourselves – of how we continue becoming the beings that we are.”

pacman

patterns of life- different paths- same obstacles.
We observe all types of patterned behavior in humans, but not all arises to a level of particular concern.
Understanding the important patterns of life is directly related to fulfillment.
pacman on youtube

Elements

Elements that make up the page don't break down easily into hierarchical units. How we would make something like this if we were starting from scratch & wanted to this Victorian type and woodcuts?

First, we can look at the elements that comprise the page. We can tell each page is individually important.
Each page has a text box, with decorative grapevines around the text box; inside the text box, the title gets its own page; on the second page, there's the title repeated, followed by two body paragraphs, separated by a fleuron.
The first paragraph gets an illustrated drop cap.
Each word, if you want to go down that far, is composed of letters.
But if you look closer, you'll find that the elements on the page don't decompose into categories quite so neatly.

If you look at the left-hand page, you can see that the title's not all there – this is the second title page in the book. The title isn't part of the rather, they're overlapping units.
And the page backgrounds aren't mirror images of each other: each has been created uniquely. Everything here's been precisely adjusted by hand.
You couldn't replicate this lettering with a font.

You can't really build a schema to represent what's on these two pages.

DEEP HYPERTEXT: THE XANADU MODEL

Today's one-way hypertext– the World Wide Web– is far too shallow. 
The Xanadu project foresaw world-wide hypertext decades ago, and endeavored to create a much deeper system by implementation of:
•UNBREAKABLE LINKS
•COPYRIGHT SIMPLIFICATION AND SOFTENING:
by special permissions and methods, quotations of any size may be used by anyone and mixed together.
•ORIGIN CONNECTION:
All quotations and excerpts stay connected to their original.
•TWO-WAY LINKS:
anyone may publish connected comments to any page.
•SIDE-BY-SIDE INTERCOMPARISON OF CONNECTED DOCUMENTS
showing two-way links, differences between versions, origins of contexts. 
•DEEP VERSION MANAGEMENT:
documents may be changed incrementally (with each version available); versions may branch; authors may easily see exact differences between versions.
•INCREMENTAL PUBLISHING:
new changes may be continually made by authors without breaking links.

Men, War & Peace

david lachapelle, james nachtwey, helmut newton

The link for the show