Description: The installation “Cyclone.soc” takes text from flamewar-ridden, fanatic religious and political newsgroups and maps them to the atmospheric topologies of severe storms. In doing so it brings together 2 forms of intensity in make visible the volatile nature of debate that can occur in such social spaces.
The project also makes implicit links between extreme belief systems and their possible potential wider impacts in the material world.
In terms of new media discourse, the project may be described as “Indy Visualisation” , in that it seeks to assimilate insights and processes from scientific visualisations to aesthetic, critical and conceptual knowledge in the visual arts.
Interaction: The installation can be configured to point at different newsgroups. It can be self-running or it can function interactively - allowing users to navigate the emergent cyclonic conditions and zoom in, to read the text.
Medium: bespoke software written in Open GL/C++, found social material taken from the Internet.
Production date: 2006
Cyclone.soc was awarded an honorary mention at Ars Electronica 2006, Linz, Austria, and was also exhibited as part of the "Connecting Worlds" exhibition at the NTT Inter-Communication Center (ICC), Tokyo October 2006.
Full Description
Intense conviction is the subject matter of Cyclone.soc , an immersive interactive environment that combines Internet debates between extremist religious and political groups with severe weather conditions. Streamed live, different newsgroup postings are fitted to the atmospheric topologies of a number of cyclonic weather fronts of differing strengths, giving the overall effect of the conversational churn and eddy of argument and counter-argument.
In resituating newsgroup postings as weather precipitation, the project frees pictorial elements to act as metonyms for different types of cultural and ideological tension enabled and produced through technological domains and develops a suggestive link between these extreme belief systems and their potential wider ecological impacts on the material world by reminding us of the effect that intense convictions have on our wider realities.
Medium: bespoke software written in Open GL/C++, found social material taken from the Internet.
Production date: 2006
Cyclone.soc was awarded an honorary mention at Ars Electronica 2006, Linz, Austria, and was also exhibited as part of the "Connecting Worlds" exhibition at the NTT Inter-Communication Center (ICC), Tokyo October 2006.
Work metadata
- Year Created: 2005
- Submitted to ArtBase: Wednesday Nov 1st, 2006
- Original Url: http://www.reconnoitre.net/cyclone/cyclone.html
- Permalink: http://www.reconnoitre.net/cyclone/cyclone.html
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Work Credits:
- Tom Corby, creator
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