New(s)wor(l)d (2008)

This project utilises content shared through RSS feeds on the internet and transforms it into an audiovisual composition. The data is processed through computer coding, resulting in colour, movement, sound, and graphical patterns that create a unique environment. This environment depicts a chaotic digital landscape of the world in a poetic and subjective manner. It reflects our era, our perspectives, and the contemporary atmosphere in a real-time, holistic vision.

While the rapid development of technologies affirms ever-increasing speeds of information processing, the evolution of communication means follows a similar rhythm and often pushes thoughts in unforeseen directions. The cognitive development of perception suggests a perpetual motion meta-language in which the re-reading of senses, by themselves, happens at each quantum interval period.

Charged with news every time the eyelids open, the brain adapts to this growing reality by creating evolutionary and survival alternatives. The organisation of processes for specific knowledge appropriation necessarily passes through learning and naming the ecosystem featured as the present reality. Drawing from these considerations and taking into account obvious and trivial alternatives in the cybernetic internet environment, this project proposes the affirmation of RSS technology, pushing it to the extreme of artistic creation.

Chance, open work, art, and food

Solid food is not the exclusive source of life of the Human Being. Along the historical path of our species, less dense forms of food were more explicit and of great use on a daily basis. Without extensive consideration of this fact, it is worth focusing on information as food in a non-metaphorical sense.

The human brain is always on the verge of fully and genuinely incorporating the "now," but it never quite reaches this goal. There is nothing wrong with that because it continues searching for this utopia, which leads it to come across another type of discovery, different from the "goal" but sufficiently interesting. One of man's selective artifices, culminating in something with the RSS characteristics, suggests an evident purpose: to make relevant information available in real-time to specific individuals in specific circumstances so that they can use it as food.

RSS's primary function is to link sites of the same quality or interest, building specific networks and fulfilling its purpose in the minds of every individual who uses this technology. The proposed open work aims to remove from this final interpreter the task of judging. Starting from specific directives and specifications, this software will then transform casual variables into images that can be appreciated and judged by the interpreter. 

Openwork takes art to new territories, as it leads the creation to endure itself by portraying the cosmos captured by human mechanisms. To sustain itself by creating images dictated by chance and linked to the spectators' wills and desires and their total freedom of interactive input.

Spectators can add inputs at any time as long as the site makes RSS information available and the bandwidth used allows this information traffic. The user sees the final images projected and can register a new section on the mechanism through the USer INterface.

Each RSS feed creates a ball that spreads light and sound in real time, according to the information coming from the feed. When a feed finds similar content in another feed, it creates a line connecting them. Everyone can insert or delete feeds in the system. For this, there is a screen-based interface that enables interaction.

Concept & Creative Direction: Ricardo O’Nascimento

Programming: Mar Canet and Travis Kirton

Awarded by Rumos Arte Cibernétrica 2010