Jee Hyun Oh - DIY GORI:seed_1216976400, 2008

Self-evolving Environment
Collaborating with: Laboratory of Control and Mechatronics
The World Wide Web is an open environment capable of distributing information in a decentralized manner, allowing participation and the constant transformation of its content. Lev Manovich compared information or media objects to a train and each receiver to a train station: Information arrives, gets remixed with other information, and then the new package travels to other destinations where the process is repeated.

As a first experiment for DIY GORI a 'seed' was prepared for distribution throughout the Internet. -The term 'Gori' means open hook in Korean and is often used to refer to the 'fastening' and 'loosening' of human relationships- The seed to be planted in cyberspace is a blueprint for GORI, a new media plant of physical computing, growing up or dying fed by network data, connected to the Internet by USB. The blueprint is printed on a wiki site to introduce the project development process and technical details to the net-public / the self-evolving environment for free distribution that any net-citizen can browse and design on their own.
At ISEA 2008, a selected version of the blueprint is presented as an installation where its wiki contents are printed and exhibited on a more traditional medium. Seed_1216976400 is the name of the installation and the 10 digits '1216976400' indicate one specific point in time of wiki history, as a still frame of the seed evolution. It is in fact the converted Unix time stamp of 2008-07-25 00:00:00 GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) which is the first day of ISEA 2008.

DIY GORI
Few people would doubt that the Internet is an integral part of our life now through which a new cultural environment was created - alongside our natural and built environment. The late Austrian artist/architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser (who was famous for his ideas on human reconciliation with nature) often insisted that people should be more creative and responsible about their living environment, saying that "If man walks in nature's midst, then he is nature's guest and must learn to behave as a well-brought-up guest." DIY GORI questions our manners as "guests" of the internet and what roles we could play while living in this online environment.

DIY GORI focuses on the very nature of the Internet as 'Open Source Culture', the creative practice of appropriation and free sharing of found and created contents; and it experiments with the idea that objects exist as evolving pieces of digital data in cyberspace where they are continually remixed by users.

More info:http://www.diygori.net/

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• ISEA
• 2008
• installation
• self-evolving
• environment
• cyberspace
• digital
• data

[nomos2000]

I was there are ISEA 2008 in Singapore. The piece described in this short video was displayed at the ISEA electronic arts exhibition and was in fact the only piece that did not make use of electricity. Instead it showed how information is fungible and mixed throughout a network.