The Social Telephony Files
a book by Harwood, Wright, Yokokoji

“Tantalum Memorial” 2008
a new artwork by Harwood, Wright, Yokokoji

“Tantalum Memorial” is a series of telephony-based memorials by the artists group Harwood, Wright, Yokokoji, to the people who have died as a result of the “coltan wars” in the Congo. The installation is constructed out of electromagnetic Strowger switches – the basis of the first automatic telephone exchange invented in 1888. The title of the work refers to the metal tantalum, an essential component of mobile phones

Here are some more thoughts based on on last week's discussions and feedbacks

- Reconsidering DLGB: from a digital object to a collaborative system.
This notion has been used by Daniel Sharon in his Database Aesthetics text and basically it is about conceptual structuring, temporal development and incorporation of different participants (humans, artificial agents, algorithmic entities, associative networks).
The system is therefore "inter-authorshiped" and, I think, it has a lot to do with notions of media-ecology and social networking.

- One example of such system may be the sets of patterns already identified:

Some definitions

The data cube is a conceptual representation of database (or a subset of it) which offers fast access/views of data in any number of dimensions.
OLAP(Online Analytical Processing) cubes can be thought of as extensions to the two-dimensional array of a spreadsheet.
In database theory, an OLAP cube is an abstract representation of a projection of an RDBMS relation.

A data mart is a repository of data gathered from a database (or data warehouse) which allows the knowledge user to analyse the stored data in a more specialised way.
For instance, a company wants to analyse some of its data by time-period, by product, by location, by cost and by comparing this data with a budget.

Laurie Grove Baths image research - inside-out.

Student name: Iker Olabarria Larizgoitia
Date: October 13th 2007.

Objectives:

Analyze relations between subjective and objective data.
Observe the results of obtaining data from unusual reference points.
Research the possibility to (un) distinguish data obtained from alive/dead “items”.
Compare real data to processed or unreal data.
Des-optimize data collection process
Use the data extracted from reality to draw an apparently distorted reality.

Resources and strategies

1) Choose subjective and objective variables to define the way to track each item.
2) Break some data consistency rules linking subjective variables between each other even if they refer to different “properties” in items.

MA Interactive Media - Joao Wilbert

My objectives:
Map relevant sounds produced by the building on its interior/exterior (pipelines, electrical systems, doors and windows opening/closing) and by human presence inside the Laurie Grove Baths
Learn about acoustics
Learn how to work with contact microphones and capture sound
Learn how to create mySQL databases with a good level of normalization
Complete the research within the deadline

The resources and strategies I will use are:
Carefully listen sounds in different times (day and night)
Observe what sounds could be relevant to recreate the environment

Olga Panadés Massanet
October 22nd 2007.

My objectives:
o Learn more about the variables that influence how we physically experience a particular space. (For instance: amounts of light, electricity, shape of the room and the building, sound, route to access, privacy/publicity, radiation, temperature, cleanness, subjectivity, presences, height and width of walls, size of the room and shape, colour of walls, sounds, etc.)
o Map two or three of the variables that influence the energy of the different spaces in the building and cross them.
o For example take ROUTE TO ACCESS and PRESENCES. My hypothesis about the ‘route to access’ is that depending on the length, difficulty, cleanness, light of the route, number of bifurcations and therefore decisions, the space is perceived in a different way. So we could use all these information to describe a particular room.

During our sound research on the baths we recorded 21 different sounds using ambient or contact microphones. We're still trying to find access to the large bath (the limbo) and do some recording from the inside. The other possibility would be to find a hole to get install a microphone.

There's excel version of our database available for download on the following link.

Download Sound Database

Thoughts On Digital Laurie Grove Baths

MA Interactive Media
Learning Activity: Research the Laurie Grove Baths

11.Nov.2007

Digitality...

- The information used to dynamically represent physical objects in the digital system together with this nature of representation leads to a gradual transformation of the object in which the changes of its shape, theme, sources, (keywords) and even content are consistent.
- In most of the cases users get to/access digital objects through search. This is a process in which the digital objects are given vague definitions/descriptions using few (key)words or differently put, these keywords expose/unhide these objects from digital thicket.