& a blog

echoes of my time at the berkman center for internet society continue to reverberate in my life, despite my distance from the sunny side streets of cambridge, and my re-enmeshment into life as a student at brown university. tomorrow (well actually it looks like it’s technically today) is one web day, the earth day for the internet that i celebrated/promoted by enacting noe web day, all the way back in june.

in the next 24 hours, the berkman center will celebrate one web day in part by unveiling a radical new interface through which blog posts, tweets, youtube videos, flickr images, and raw urls will coexist as a dynamic bodies of information situated within a totalizing system. using tags as display criterion, users will be able to construct, deconstruct, assemble and reassemble heterogeneous media which share common tags or content types. much of this interface responds to david weinberger’s idea of the folksonomy, outlined in everything is miscellaneous.

the individuals responsible for this interface (i balk at calling at art piece because it has such utilitarian value as not exist merely as aesthetic) are a barcelona-based technology group called bestiario. bestiario have been leading a reassessment of information aesthetics (or the aesthetics of informatics as i like to call it) and are interested in finding new ways of visualizing information so as to give users more control/insight into the interrealatedness of data.

to be perfectly frank, david weinberger is the reason that the berkman center (and i) became involved in collaborating with bestiario, and reimagining the ways in which a whole bunch of media could be creatively re-visualized. i became involved with the project, because seth young, communications guru, asked me to reconsider the berkman website and the horde of content we had from this spring’s berkman@10 conference. how should this be packaged? how should this be organized? how should this be made complete? seth asked me.

i didn’t necessarily know. but i did know that the existing system was not working. within a week at the center, i compiled a list of all the materials we had from berkman@10. there were photostreams, twitter categories, youtube videos, blog posts, official videos, wikis, delicious items, and more. the only way i had to effective corral them, was to make a masterlist of hyperlinked items, and a separate delicious feed. it feel ineffective and one-dimensional, no way to related the material meaningfully or to demonstrate the ways in which this closely related set of data actually fit together.

david weinberger found me in the kitchen one afternoon and asked what i was up to. i responded by telling him about my problem of multiplicious media, an idea i did not yet know was a bit of his specialty. he mentioned the bestiario group, and showed me the work they’d done with the TED talks. i expressed my deep enjoyment of the work, but wondered: how could bestiario manage tagged content across various media types.

to skip towards the conclusion, bestiario under the guidance of santiago ortiz, had a way of relating multiple media types. they called their 6pli system, and it worked by creating a dynamic interface of an individual’s delicious feed. other groups have played with graphic re-rendering delicious as interface, but few groups if any, have worked as hard as bestiario to make that interface totalizing. i mean totalizing in the sense that it stops being a list of links taking you out of the space, and more like a browser opening content within the space.

where the hyperlink as been the building block of web1.0, related data has become the essential part of web2.0. as a result of this progression, the need has emerged for a space where one can judged the interconnectedness of data, and simultaneously engage the individual data elements. it is a new way of seeing information, one that situates the view of the data/media within context before providing it individually. this effectively reverses the current traditions of the internet, which hide such contextualization, even on a micro scale in favor of one to one hyperlink relations.

this is the domain of the scroll, the need to move vertically up and down through information as list. but following the nomenclature of the world wide web, bestiario reimagines information as webbed rather than listed, and as a result, i believe that there “view” of data actually provides a robust new viewing scheme, that adds an intelligence previously expected of the user alone. that is, the expectation that connections are made across the arrays of informatic regimes currently used by people from google to wordpress, up/down informational organization.

the domain of the scroll is the rearticulation of print, within dynamic digitalia, a possibly unnatural carryover from print to code culture like the decorative columns are a carryover from greco-roman building into an architecture that does not need them structurally, only symbolically. in this way, we must wonder how else our digital paradigms are still contigent upon print traditions, and whether the continuation of those traditions is really necessary.

in march of last year, i was in new york for a meeting when i decided to hit the museum of modern art. the museum was hosting an exhibit called “design and the elastic mind” and i was so impressed with its content and convictions, that i began to reassess the ways in which human design influences human cognition. one of the most virulent threads woven through that exhibition was what i later called the aesthetics of information in a paper i wrote some weeks later. projects like re-wiring the spy, flight patterns, or we feel fine attempted to reassess the presence of information with new aesthetic treatments. treatments that allowed new patterns to form within the information, and patterns that revealed hidden meanings in the data.

i feel that the bestiario project, to which i have served ironically as a mediator, is a project within which the aesthetics of informatics are carried towards overthrowing the scroll/print regime in digital culture. where tags and folksonomies led to a reassessment of how information could be organized, it seems that bestiario’s interface for the berkman@10 conference might provoke a reevalution of the ways that information, data, and media are displayed in digital systems. this is not to say that it is a perfect product or that it is the future of digital structuration of information, but rather that it does something powerfully new which may yet lead to an overturning of a leaf, or the discovery of a leaf hidden in the cacophony of meaning just in front of us.