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Ornamental Metaforms for a Digital Kosmos version 1.0
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Please see: CREDITS The Greek word kosmos means "order" or "ornament" (cf. Our word "cosmetic"), and when Pythagoras applied the term he was acknowledging the fact that the world is inherently [. . .] "ornamented" [ . . .]. - David Fideler
[T]he most important instrument of thought is the eye. It sees similarities before a formula has been created to identify them. - Benoit Mandelbrot
Ornamental OMDK is an interface that transcribes data from an information transaction into a three dimensional visualization - information as sculpture, abstraction as simulation. It utilizes Virtual Reality Modelling Language1 (VRML) to produce an online interactive view of the complex information structures that lie behind the familiar 2D screen-bound experience of surfing the Internet. It reconstructs a user's unique path through the internet, by visualizing the history file in the Netscape web browser, by running what is called a traceroot2 on the last ten server addresses visited while before the user came to my website. (OMDK was the first skeletal prototype of a proposed multi-stage project, executed at the Apocalypso Thematic Residency, held at the Banff Centre for the Arts3 , between October and December 1997. It was the first project to visualize any part of the internet in 3D, in a web deliverable format.) There are only two connective structures in the data-space. The ball and stick construction of the topology had to be kept simple so that it could be delivered over the low bandwidth of the Internet in 97. In my original proposal I made no specifications regarding what data set I wanted to visualize. I only knew that I wanted to utilize data that was generated as a consequence of some kind of interpersonal exchange or transmission, because of a vague intuition of the kind of topological structure that could result from its expression in a sculptural grammar. As it turned out, most of my research was conducted online, where the most extensive and up-to-date information on the technologies that I would need to do the piece resided. These were the days before Google, when search engines were far less powerful. So in seeking both information concerning what technologies were available for the task at hand, and what kinds of data sets were available for me to use, I would invariably get search results that diverged from my intended criteria, but conformed to my key words, in serendipitously poetic ways. That was when surfing the web was really surfing! And I noticed something else: most of the material in the search results had to do with the various digital technologies that constituted the internet itself, self-reflectively. It then occurred to me that the internet itself should be the data set that I would visualize, so OMDK, like crystal springs, explores the possibility that a presentational process could model itself, intensifying this process of simulation, to the point of becoming a simulacrum, and yet by so doing, to converge the representation with its own realty, all being, in a limited sphere. OMDK is a data-visualization sculpture. As such it is not a mere map, though it is a map too. It is ornamental, in the superficial contemporary sense of the word, as an embellishment having nothing to do with essence, as mere surface rather than as a making present or apparent an aspect or part of the world. Its form is cosmetic in the modern sense of not being essential to it; it represents a purely informational topology. However, simultaneously I was also trying to invoke the more archaic notion of ornament, as an expression of an underlying cosmological (etymologically related to the Greek word "Kosmos") order.4 In the sense in which I was attempting to create this "ornamental" structure, OMDK was literally an augmentation of the surface of the web-page. OMDK is thus "cosmetic," in this now more radicalized sense. Hence it's name. " 1. [S]hort for Virtual Reality Modelling Language, VRML is a specification for displaying 3-dimensional objects on the World Wide Web. You can think of it as the 3-D equivalent of HTML. [. . .] VRML produces a hyperspace (or a world), a 3-dimensional space that appears on your display screen. And you can figuratively move within this space. That is, as you press keys to turn left, right, up or down, or go forwards or backwards, the images on your screen will change to give the impression that you are moving through a real space." - http://webopedia.com 2. "A utility that traces a packet from your computer to an Internet host, showing how many hops the packet requires reaching the host and how long each hop takes. If you're visiting a Web site and pages are appearing slowly, you can use traceroute to figure out where the longest delays are occurring. [. . .] The original traceroute is a UNIX utility, but nearly all platforms have something similar." - http://webopedia.com 3. Banff, Alberta, Canada, http://www.banffcentre.ab.ca/mva/mvaataglance.html#bnmi 4. . . . all-be-it one that may pertain only to cyberspace. |
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