Bottle

CONCEPT: Facebook Message In A Bottle.

I have been questioning the concept of time within a digital environment, comparative to time in a real environment.

Article from the telegraph involving a found letter in a bottle and the recipients search for the sender.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/7836150/The-mystery-of-the-message-in-the-bottle.html

Exhibition - Unleashed Devices

Many of the pieces in the exhibition were no longer working. This is a huge downfall of digital artwork that i had not considered.

My favourite work on show - Owen Bowden

Crimewave is a radiophonic police drama featuring live police radio from across America. Police radio communications from several cities are intercepted and fed live over the net to the Watermans building where they are combined and layered with tense incidental music.

Disembodied voices report with nonchalance the sometimes chilling criminal proceedings of the cities made the more chilling with the realisation that the events unfolding to the listener are in the present and not a recording. These real events though are dramatised through the artificial imposition of the filmic soundtrack. The work explores themes of privacy, policing, radio and the relationship between reality, drama and soundtrack.

[Taken from 'Unleashed Devices Catalogue']

WEB:

http://www.watermans.org.uk/exhibitions/exhibitions/archive/unleashed-devices.aspx

Research For 'Digital Is...'

Louise Naunton Morgan, is the founding “human printer” behind the project and was inspired by the desire to reclaim some of the lost art of production. “Today technology plays a huge role in everyday life…we have constructed these machines to aid our lives, making simple productions/tasks easier to accomplish. Our environment is now scattered with machine made artefacts, computer developed images and autonomous interactions – We are loosing the essence of human production and craft to the machine, resulting in a soulless utilitarianism.”

(KK OUTLET)

While there have been huge benefits to society from the digital revolution, especially in terms of the accessibility of information, there are a number of concerns. Expanded powers of communication and information sharing, increased capabilities for existing technologies, and the advent of new technology brought with it many potential opportunities for exploitation. The digital revolution helped usher in a new age of mass surveillance, generating a range of new civil and human rights issues. Reliability of data became an issue as information could easily be replicated, but not easily verified. The digital revolution made it possible to store and track facts, articles, statistics, as well as minutia hitherto unfeasible.

From the perspective of the historian, a large part of human history is known through physical objects from the past that have been found or preserved, particularly in written documents. Digital records are easy to create but also easy to delete and modify. Changes in storage formats can make recovery of data difficult or near impossible, as can the storage of information on obsolete media for which reproduction equipment is unavailable, and even identifying what such data is and whether it is of interest can be near impossible if it is no longer easily readable, or if there is a large number of such files to identify. Information passed off as authentic research or study must be scrutinised and verified. With such massive proliferation of information it became possible to write an article citing wholly false sources, also based on false sources.

These problems are further compounded by the use of digital rights management and other copy prevention technologies which, being designed to only allow the data to be read on specific machines, may well make future data recovery impossible. Interestingly, the Voyager Golden Record, which is intended to be read by an intelligent extraterrestrial (perhaps a suitable parallel to a human from the distant future), is recorded in analog rather than digital format specifically for easy interpretation and analysis. (Wikipedia - Digital Revolution)

(Wikipedia Page :Digital environments)

Information Sharing And Privacy

The Internet, especially the WWW in the 1990s, opened whole new avenues for communication and information sharing. The ability to easily and rapidly share information on a global scale brought with it a whole new level of freedom of speech. Individuals and organisations were suddenly given the ability to publish on any topic, to a global audience, at a negligible cost, particularly in comparison to any previous communication technology.

(Wikipedia Page :Digital environments)

Maps Of Digital Environments

As a person that does not use any social networking websites, surrounded by people that do, I often think of myself being in a minority. However the key in the top left of the image above shows the comparative use of social networking sites in relation to SMS, Email and more importantly, spoken word.

Emotion is human. We can show our emotions through physical movements and by altering the tone of our voice.

Therefore if a digital message is void of emotion, is it really 'human' interaction.