MIXED REALITIES is an international juried competition that will result in the commissioning of 5 networked art works to be exhibited/performed at Turbulence.org; Art Interactive, a gallery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A; and Ars Virtua, a gallery in the online 3D rendered environment, Second Life. Each commission will be $5,000 (US).

Deadline is March 31, 2007.

Bridging multiple realities while maintaining autonomy, engaging the user as a participant, and having both one-to-one and one-to-many communication within the work are among the investigation fields.

I was looking at the SecondLife Economy Graphs the other day, the numbers are justfying the hype about SL. Well such simulated social environments need comprehensive critiques for sure. It makes me think of how deep we are engaged with the computer networks. Can we talk about networked art within a networked simulation?

Yahoo! launches the Pipes service for everyone to reprogram resources on the web. It is a visual programming environment for aggregating and manipulating feeds, a “Mashup 2.0″ application in a way. Pipes derives its name from UNIX pipeline where the output of each process feeds directly as input of the next one. With Yahoo! Pipes output of web services can easily be hooked up to filters and manipulators, so you can chain a set of web services and processes.

A Pipe connecting two feeds from different news alerts based on the search query (simplified version of Aggregated News Alert).

There are already comprehensive Pipe reviews here, here, and here. Also check out the Aggregated News Alert pipe as an example to see how a pipe can be used. I will just point to details I found interesting. Each pipe has a permalink. You can run, clone, view the source of each pipe from the web interface. Any url can be used as an input, so RESTful urls become more important. A pipe can also be hooked up to another pipe as input. Pipes aggregates metadata similar to a usual web application. Run counts and Clone counts make a pipe hot or not. Yahoo! Pipes probably tracks the programming activity such as the counts for most used filters, resources, operators and their combinations. So Pipes aggregates metadata about programming as well.

Yahoo! Pipes will sure open various directions in the informational space. It will also accumulate capital through unpaid surplus labour performed by the Yahoo! users. Tim O’Reilly says: “What’s really lovely about this is that, like the Unix shell, Pipes provides a gradual introduction to web programming.”

Yeah that’s true, prosumers (producer + consumer) will learn how to program, so in a way Pipes enables programming for prosumers. I think Pipes is a powerful step for making the programming as part of the immaterial labor.

Brent released the Yummy Tag Buffet, a bubble-up browsing tool for personal del.icio.us tags and bookmarks. Bubble-up is an interaction/visualization metaphor we were discussing in the PLW last year. It is basically the comparison of the sizes of emerging visual elements in time. As certain tags are repeatedly used, they emerge as dominant keywords in a tag cloud. As a result we can compare their growth in time. Check out Brent’s yummy timeline, it has nice features to discover. You can select a time interval, a week for example, and drag it on the timeline to see the frequency of the number of tags. Mouse over the bookmarks on the list and see related tags in the cloud. It is a nice bubble-up browser for digging into the aggregated information. Here is my del.icio.us bookmarks‘ tags for the last 6 months. Apparently programming, arts, networks, politics, collectivity, socialsoftware, economics, and techno-culture are the most used ones:

Related:
Brent also made one for Openstudio tags in the last summer.
Tom Coates of Plasticbag wrote about bubble-up folksonomies.

John recently pointed out this document from 1988: “How to do Research at the MIT AI Lab“. Well, the conditions have changed a lot with the networked information organization and exchange systems, but there might still be relevant information since it is mostly the documentation of the authors’ personal experiences.

Today many research groups at the MIT Media Laboratory use wikis and blogs for research documentation. They do live demos and enter information to project databases. What else? They write theses. But not many of them incorporate so called wisdom of crowds in their research[*]. I think the Openstudio project of PLW, up and running more than a year, is a good start in this direction. The research becomes literally live with the continuous interaction of people and machines. Brent, Amber, Luis, Tak, Kyle, and Mariana from PLW keep building experimental live systems that continuously generate information for learning and exploration. In 2007, it would be great to put together a document describing methods extracted from these live research experiences.

[*] Projects I know using the wisdom of crowds in some way:
+ Commonsense Computing at MIT Media Lab
+ Processing
+ Although closed now, Cameron Marlow’s Blogdex

Today I read my friend Brent’s thesis proposal draft “Promiserver“. He is rethinking the contract system in the context of networked collaboration and creative micro-economy. He has been building web services and APIs to facilitate a trustworthy promise system. As an alternative to written-once static contracts, he is proposing procedural dynamic contracts that emerge from the community. In his words, Brent says:

“The project aims to offer a sensible, lightweight promise network as an alternative to heavy and inefficient legal commitments, and to facilitate new models of collaborative business by reducing transaction costs and improving market fluidity.”

It is obvious that while the scale of a promise network is growing in time, it could attract more people to trust the central promises in the network. The bigger the tie strength, the more we can trust those promises. If the social construction is important for trust, maybe the procedures in these contracts are procedurally regulated by the network effects around them.