Datamining social media to create unconscious collaborative art – scary, amazing!

SOCIAL SYNTHESIZER from aetherbits on Vimeo.

We take pictures and post them on Flikr.  We make calls on Skype.  Now, a group of artists and software engineers are sweeping through the minutiae of our lives.  These moments would have been lost in photo albums, stored in a musty basement.  These conversations would have run through their finite course and be left only as fading memories of the participants.

But datamining in this case is not about Dick Chaney recording those conversations or using those photos to incriminate and destroy enemies, real or imagined.  No, in this case, the data is being smashed together and run through a real-time-score generator which turns the sounds from Skype and the images from Flickr into an audiovisual representation of human existence and experience on this planet.

Forget religion.  Forget drugs.  Forget music.  This is higher consciousness, as revealed by the connectedness of all (or much of) humanity through technology.  Woah!

(via Synthtopia)