hey miguel,
this project should cooperate with this:
http://cloudy.halo.gen.nz/
regards,
-a
Dear all
Our new web project is already on-line. Please
report any bug. Comments are also welcome.
Txs
ml
===========================
CLOUDS OF CLOUDS
by Miguel Leal and Luis Sarmento
===========================
http://www.virose.pt/clouds_of_clouds
Clouds of clouds is a random generator of cloud
images. Each new cloud is unique and indexed to
a particular time (GMT) on a particular day.
Clouds of Clouds was developed in Perl + MySQL.
It works over a database of more than 1.000.000
photos of clouds.
Photo information was gathered from Flickr
between September 10-13 2008, using Flickr API.
The database will be regularly updated.
Clouds of clouds is a web-based project
comissioned for Interact 15
[http://www.interact.com.pt/].
The project was produced between July and September 2008.
hosted by virose.pt
______________________
"This is randomness, and that is altogether
different. If absolutely necessary, you can
count the stars. A catalogue has been kept of
them since Antiquity. But if you ask for a
catalogue of the clouds, people laugh at you.
There is no such term as cloud, defined as
permanent, defined by its borders, by its terms
or its terminations. [] Clouds, whirlwinds,
flows, noises, all primary masses without
qualities."
(M. Serres)
Chaos theories, as they have emerged in strength
since the 1960s, with their focus on complexity,
were in fact an answer to the monstrous and
misshapen nature of certain phenomena that were
revealed to be resistant to determinist
equations or to the laws of causality.
Atmospheric phenomena such as clouds have always
been seen as an image of the inability to submit
certain realities to precise measurement. To all
intents and purposes, clouds appeared to be a
perfect example of irreducibility, instability
and unpredictability. Clouds, in their apparent
causal disjunction, like a whirlwind or vortex,
represented the principles of error, exception
and monstrosity.
Perhaps this is why there have never been dreams
of an individual cloud catalogue, since it would
be so absurd. If we ask anybody for something
similar, we risk being ridiculed, as Michel
Serres recalls. Clouds are instantly fleeting
and have no number or stable form. They exist
now and no longer exist a moment later. We can
classify the clouds approximately, order them by
type or try to understand their signs but we
have no way of archiving them.
The exponential growth of Web files,
particularly with the participative forms that
Web 2.0 has made common, has finally brought us
an embryo for these absurd archives, and not
only for clouds. Everything that has always been
firmly uncataloguable seems to have found its
place in the distributed digital archives.
At the same time, curiously, we have an
increasing popularity in recent years for terms
such as Cloud Computing, Cloud Architecture,
Data Clouds, Text Clouds or Tag Clouds, in what
represents the attribution of a new semantic
power to our idea of a cloud. Particularly on
the web, with the explosion of social networks,
it has become common to use similar devices to
organise meta-information generated by users.
Clouds of clouds is a random generator of cloud
images. Each new cloud is unique and indexed to
a particular time (GMT) on a particular day. Its
clouds were made on similar dates and at similar
times, not necessarily the same year, and are
linked to the original web pages.
The basis of the archives are all images indexed
with the tags <cloud> or <clouds> on Flickr.
These are not clouds in the atmospheric meaning
of the word, but instead entities with which
they share a complexity that can be confused
with instability, unpredictability and
irreducibility. That this is based on a
relatively simple visualisation arrangement is
another way of indicating that this complexity
depends less on what we see on the surface than
on the networks of relationships established
from it.
The clouds generated by the users are kept in
searchable archives. These archives will grow
with the project and are intended to become,
over time, veritable daily, monthly, yearly
archives of clouds. Clouds of clouds also works
as a type of infinite nesting doll: clouds
within clouds, archives within archives.
Clouds of clouds is a project by Miguel Leal and Luís Sarmento
__________________________
........................................................................
*Virose Organization*
*Porto.Portugal*
*http://www.virose.pt | http://arch.virose.pt*
e-zine vector: http://www.virose.pt/vector
........................................................................
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______________________________________________
SPECTRE list for media culture in Deep Europe
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