“My nephew has HDADD: Hi-Definition Attention Deficit Disorder. He can barely pay attention, but when he does it’s unbelievably clear.” – Steven Wright

Since Twitter came out it was pretty obvious it was something else. Its minimal, quasi-zen approach (short haiku-style posts, ultra-light interface, a very “carpe diem” real-time nature) won many users over. But why would such a restrictive, limited social network become so popular? There are so many more things you can do via MySpace or Facebook, where you can easily embed everything possibly embeddable.
Nonetheless, although Mark Zuckerberg‘s well-tested money-making machine is still bigger than Twitter (I’d go as far as to say it’s almost necessary for internet users), the social colossus has been learning a lot from its younger, smarter brother.
The “twitterification” of Facebook has raised some perplexities and the opening of that once closed and well-guarded environment wouldn’t necessarily be a good thing for their business. I like the definition of Facebook as a “gated community” (read here): you can easily do everything you need on the internet inside of it and forget about the outside web. This has been part of the network’s strenght in the past, one more reason why it is both scary and addictive.
While Twitter’s openness (making information public and searchable in real-time) has definitely played a major role in the social network’s rise to pop culture phenomenon, replacing Facebook as the next internet thing, I think there is another factor worth analyzing (and no, it’s not journalist A.D.D.).
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Here’s a post I already published on yskira.com a few months ago.

Thanks to the internet, we now own more knowledge than we can possibly absorb. As a consequence, the web is more and more about interfaces, about the way we’re served this cognitive over-abundance and the graphic ways we can filter it. Interfaces become the aesthetics of the latest postmodernity: when all information is common, to filter, choose, and even discard it, is an act of elegance, a semiotic gesture more significant than information itself. So, the explosion of maps, indexes, graphs and charts over the internet becomes the world wide web’s most relevant content. (more…)

(I did this interview for Ymag. You can also read it here.)

As promised, here's the second part of our interview to bestiario.org. These last questions touch the very sensible subject of geospatial web, one of the emerging technologies that are already changing (and are likely to change more) internet use for everybody.

What do you think is the correct balance between direct information and an imaginative visualization? Do you consider your work as closer to visual research, like generative art, or to conveying customized, intuitive information modeled on the reading user?

Different projects deserve different approaches. But there are two things we don´t want to create: aesthetic experiences that barely communicates an idea and analytic and cryptical tools that give computed answers. We believe in the power of human brain – and not only on its rational capacities – to understand and create. Our spaces should facilitate the brain's hard work giving it information and several ways to navigate it, display it and combine it. We strongly believe in intuition. Our spaces might give and experience to perception, analysis and intuition. Generative art is usually devoted to results instead of giving understanding of the processes. That´s why, although if we use some generative arts techniques, we are more close to "conveying customized, intuitive information modeled on the reading user". (more…)

(I did this interview for Ymag. You can also read it here.)

As you readers probably remember we've dealt with bestiario.org and their dynamic data visualization interfaces before. Here's an interview with Bestiario's Santiago Ortiz, who answered a few questions dealing with the group's activities and future projects, plus new tendencies and perspectives for internet use. It's a pretty long read, so I split it in two. Enjoy.

When and why did you realize you wanted to work with graphic data visualization?

I began playing with code very early, when I was 12 years old. I used to play with random numbers, or sinusoidal functions to create interesting patterns. Then I discovered complexity: fractals, cellular automata, chaotic functions, which generates much more interesting shapes and dynamics. Finally, as a natural step that increases complexity, I discovered the possibility of working with external data. My first serious project on data visualization was GNOM (2005), based on genetic data. With Bestiario we have developed a powerful framework based on graph theory, topological algorithms, physic models, geometrical and geographical representations…

What kind of clients do you usually have?

One of the most interesting things of this work is the wide diversity of persons and institutions than can require information spaces (and also the aims of the projects). Although the main kind of clients are cultural institutions this pattern is changing and we begin to work more with big companies. Among our clients there are cultural institutions, communication enterprises, big companies, research departments (university and enterprises), advertising agencies, museums, educational institutions. (more…)

This is an article I originally wrote for Ymag.

Ion Bitzan, Map (1978)

It's no surprise Polis has recently opened one of their articles with the same Jorge Luis Borges quote as Jean Baudrillard did in his introduction to "Simulacra and Simulation". The quote comes from a story about an insanely detailed 1:1 scale map of an empire, eventually shredding apart and leaving scattered remains on the very soil it used to discipline.

The reason why Borges' vision is so important today is not only the recent popularization of mapping, especially on the internet, but its evolution into a virtualized and pervasive layer overlapping with both our online and offline experiences. If Christopher Alexander's "Notes on the Synthesis of Form", although focused on architectural design and civil engineering, has also influenced software writers, augmented space and virtuality make the conceptual relationship between city design and network design intersecting rather than isomorphic.

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