Switchboard A Realtime Art Toolkit

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SwitchboardA Real-time Art Toolkit
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100 Cans, 1962 Andy Warhol oil on canvas72 x 52
in (182.9 x 132.1 cm)Albright-Knox Art Gallery,
Buffalo
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100 Blackberries, 2006 Jeffrey CrousePhotoshop 40
0 pixels x 600 pixels Jeffs Laptop
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Real-Time Art
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Definition

• Three distinct parts
• One or more data sources
• The work itself
• The user/viewer
• Created/assembled in real-time
• acquire
• parse
• filter
• mine
• represent
• refine
• interact

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Values

• Flux
• Aura
• Subversion
• Aggregation
• Interactivity

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Flux

• The quality that comes from liveness
• The user can see the data changing
• The user feels like she is watching something as
  it is unfolding
• The liveness is reflected in the representation

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Celestial Mechanics D. Scott Hessels and Gabriel
Dunne
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Aura

• A digital artwork that is never the same twice
• Regains some of the uniqueness

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The Unseen MovieDaniel Scheibel and Ferdinand
Weinrother
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Subversion

• Using data sources in ways which the owners
  wouldnt necessarily condone.
• Origins in screen-scraping subversive by
  definition

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TheyRule.net
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Witness
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Aggregation

• Drawing together many data sources
• Highlights connections that wouldnt be obvious
  otherwise
• Can achieve an encyclopedic or intelligent
  effect

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EigenRadio
If you took a bunch of music and asked it,
'Music, what are you, really?' you'd hear
Eigenradio singing back at you. - Brian Whitman
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Interactivity

• Not yet an important value in real-time art
• Difficult to reconcile interactivity with
  separation of data source and user
• Difficult to achieve a sense of agency when any
  influence on the data source is very subtle

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Friendster Pachinko
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The Semantic Web
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Web Services

• Corporate funded
• Amazon
• Google
• Yahoo
• Used Semantic-Web friendly formats
• SOAP
• REST
• JSON
• people-centered
• Flickr
• Del.icio.us
• YouTube
• GoogleMaps
• Etc
• Etc
• Etc

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Switchboard Design

• Acquire
• Parse
• Filter
• Mine
• Represent
• Refine
• Interact

Switchboard
Artist
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Design Specs

• Remain Extensible
• Switchboard skeleton class
• Limit Required Knowledge
• Abstract classes/interfaces
• Casting/Classes/instanceof
• Exceptions
• Threads
• Provide Simplified Documentation
• Documentation.php
• Stay Self-contained
• NUX to the rescue
• Encourage the Use of Multiple Services

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Dependencies

• Heavy use of Java IO
• NUX
• Saxon
• XOM
• Lucene
• Tagsoup and JTidy
• Apache Axis
• WSDL2Java
• SOAP
• Smack

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Lets write some programs!
How do I get Switchboard?
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Background (1.0)
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2.0

• It was a dark and stormy night