Monet never knew
              he was painting his "Lilies" for
      a lady from the Chicago Art Institute
          who went to France and filmed
              today's lilies
              by the "Bridge at Giverny"
                  a leaf afloat among them
      the film of which now flickers
          at the entrance to his framed visions
              with a Debussy piano soundtrack
flooding with a new fluorescence (fleur-essence?)
      the rooms and rooms
              of waterlilies

Monet caught a Cloud in a Pond
               in 1903
      and got a first glimpse
                      of its lilies and for twenty years returned
      again and again to paint them
          which now gives us the impression
              that he floated thru life on them
                              and their reflections
          which he also didn�t know
              we would also have occasion
                          to reflect upon
Anymore than he could know
          that John Cage would be playing a
              "Cello with Melody-driven Electronics"
                      tonight at the University of Chicago
And making those Lilies shudder and shed
                                  black light

—Lawrence Ferlinghetti, 1950s

The thing I like most about this poem is the underlying conflict between expressionism/impressionism, but how that’s totally unnecessary to aesthetically enjoying the poem. Irony?

(aside: Poetry sucks in html. This is the best fix I could find. My apologies.)

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.