Inside the Tower
Babel, constructed by computer scientist Simon Biggs, provides a shared, 3D navigation space based on the Dewey Decimal system. As Johannes Grenzfurthner describes it,
At Babel, viewers logged onto the site are confronted with a 3D visualization of an abstract data space mapped as arrays and grids of Dewey decimal numbers. As they move the mouse around the screen, they can navigate this 3D environment. All users are able to see what the other users - who are simultaneously logged onto the site - are seeing.
There's also
an artist's statement by Biggs, a link to
Biggs' main site (I think) and an overview by Steve Dietz of the Walker Art Center, "
Reverse Engineering the Library: Simon Biggs' Babel."
One of the most significant aspects of the art of misuse for "Babel" is its multi-user functionality. Part of the project's initial appeal for the user is precisely its implicit promise of "debabelizing" the information overload of the Internet by using the DDC to classify it and intelligent agents to prioritize it. As multiple users log on at the same time, however, "Babel" quickly becomes just that - a beautiful visual riot of overlapping numbers, and, while, in fact, each user can navigate his or her own version of the library-Internet interface, it's so stimulating that one has the definite feeling, beyond a certain number of simultaneous users, of being navigated rather than navigating; a kind of collective unconscious filtering the Net.
For Biggs this represents a kind of tug-of-war between a phenomenological view of the world, in which we are always interacting with it from a first person perspective, and some kind of objective reality, such as the DDC system. Neither one is right or wrong, but they are in some kind of intertwined opposition, and the resulting chaos can just as easily be seen as beauty as a fall from grace as in the biblical story.
[via Johannes Grenzfurthner guestbar at
boing-boing]
I hope Johannes keeps a blog permanently--he's had a run of very interesting posts
Posted by johndan at March 9, 2004 07:18 PM
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