Information, Knowledge as Art
Came across Newsmap this afternoon, a google maps mashup by Ben O’Neill today that plots locations mentioned in BBC news on a map of the world.
The implementation was neat, but I can’t help but dream of what this could be like. Imagine a map of the world (perhaps OLED, mounted on your wall), with regional coloring based on density of news events in that area. You’d need a few hacks to make things look nice (normalization for standard-level-of-news per area (different areas of the world have different minimum levels of media coverage) … smoothing so that local news-concentration influences regional news-concentration). And a gradient would do a lot more for visualization than these discrete news-event-bubbles (but I realize that the google maps api limits you to location bubble markers, and remixers are limitted to the tools at hand).
I love to see non-art becoming art. To this day, one of my favorite random conversations was with Tom and danah at a conference a year or so ago, where we discussed a fellow information addict who had covered all the walls of his house with bookshelfs full of books. Information, knowledge became art–and it evolved so both organically and unobtrusively.