Netbody V1
April, 2007
The 'attention economy' is a term used to describe the current business environment where consumers are constantly surrounded by information. In this context, the scarcity of attention becomes the most important economic factor. This economic characterization of 'attention' becomes interesting when you consider that online businesses have been busy storing massive amounts of data about users, and processing it through recommendation engines and the like in an effort to 'profile' the user, and better keep their attention. It is as if each individual has a shadow-self composed of data points living in corporate databases. We are constantly producing data in ways that are not always obvious.
My interest in this area extends beyond the economic model of attention. In parallel to the corporate databases containing an individual's 'profile' - the individual is also constantly in the process of collecting, and creating data. In the same way that contemporary first world cultures are immersed in networked computing, all people are immersed in social networks. Attention operates in all these areas to identify discrete bits of information as a means of self-identification, and orientation within the environment. The process is not perfect, attention is limited, and flows of information are constantly passing through the networks. The result is a constantly shifting approximation of the individual.
NetBody operates partially as an analogy for this process, but also uses current network data. Images and text are collected from news feeds and Flickr (photo sharing website). The collected data is dispersed in a 3D visualization space. At the same time a red point moves within the space, functioning as 'attention.' When the red point intersects an image, it becomes fixed in space, and opaque. A copy is also added to the side panel, and the associated text is added to the bottom panel. The sound component of the project also offers clues to its structure. One sound is associated with new data coming in from the network, another with intersections of the attention marker and the images. The path the red point takes traces a figure on a plane, so the ultimate goal of the system is to illustrate the figure. However, after a certain period of time, "fixed" images will start moving again, there's never a way this process can actually finish.
Quicktime movie 1 19MB
Quicktime movie 2 30MB
