 So, we're Coover, we're a creative studio based out in the UK. We are a team of technologists, of designers, engineers, artists that cover a broad spectrum of different subjects, different topics. We work with brands and sort of cultural institutions to make a range of pieces, ranging from data visualisations, web-based experiences, installations. We've been working in partnership with IAHK to explore cryptocurrency. We've been doing that through a project we're calling Symphony of the Blockchain, which is an audio-visual experience of cryptocurrency. We've developed a web-based experience that allows users to navigate through the history of the blockchain and explore all those different internal properties and some of those abstract data points that people aren't familiar with and it's been a really fascinating example journey for us that we've got to learn a lot about this underlying technology and sort of finding a metaphor in which we can present it through. We're really keen to take this further and make it a tool of utility and that's the big thing for us is the idea that we can use this as a means for people to compare different cryptocurrencies. The underlying design process of this is to be able to represent properties of cryptocurrency and by having the ability to compare something like Bitcoin compared to Ethereum, Cardano or IOTA allows you to see these inherent properties underlying and just compare them so we want to make it, we really want to make it something where people have never seen it before and they can come to it and use it. They can look for specific dates, they can find forks. Something that's never been conveyed before is the idea that the branches and the forks in the history of blockchains. The idea of using scale and colour in a 3D environment is really well first to be used in a sort of VR experience because you can navigate that space, you can pick things up, you can explore blocks as tangible objects that you can hold in your hand which is going to be amazing to do and we'd also like to expand this work and use it in a ticket on a touring in a sort of an exhibition kind of environment where we can take it to different places and allow people to come to this space and explore those different aspects of cryptocurrency. The challenges for us, I think the main challenge with us was we never had any understanding of cryptocurrency at all. It was on our periphery, the idea of the blockchain of these financial transactions that happened in a very different way to the norm, was entirely new and it allowed us to really investigate that both the technology but the concept as well and what that facilitates on a social level. We've been looking at some webGL technology that is very new, we're trying to push the envelope always creatively in what we can do and both technically what we achieve. Hi guys, thanks very much for coming today. This is a little slot we're going to do on a little bit of ours and the project to be working on. So, yeah, just to start off, hi. Again, thanks for coming. We are with KUVA, we're really excited to be here to show off a bit of the work and some of the stuff that we've been doing on with IOHK and tell you a little bit about what we do. My name is Mark Lundin, I'm the creative director and the sort of founder of KUVA. We are a design studio based out of the UK and I always find it's to give you a bit of background about what we do, it's often better to sort of show some of the work we do rather than explain it. We do a lot of, it's quite dark there, you can't see it, but we do a lot of large-scale sort of data visualization pieces. This is something we did for Twitter last year which is a sort of touring exhibition of their social media data. Again, it's quite dark, you can't see it, but there's a large screen there and there's a sort of a lot of, it's a data visualization piece. We help sort of generate and concept content for different clients. We range, we work with brands such as Adidas, it's a project we did last year. This is the Geneva Car Show, we did a live interactive piece on the background there. And we sort of walk with institutions, sort of cultural institutions. This is something we did for the new school who are a university in New York. We did a piece with. We also have worked on a project for Google. This was a doodle that went on the homepage of Google for 24 hours, which was quite stressful. And that leads us on to a little bit about why we're here today, why I'm here. I want to talk about a really exciting project we've been sort of working on with with the creative team at IOHK. It's really exciting, we call it the symphony of the blockchain and it's launching today. So the symphony of the blockchain is an interactive audio-visual exploration of cryptocurrency and blockchain through Bitcoin. I'll go through a little bit of that later. It's an ongoing research initiative that we're working together with to help bring about the sort of greater understanding of some of the technology that underpins cryptocurrency. So today what I'm going to go through is a little bit about the sort of the design process that we went through to get to our final piece. How we got to where we are, a walk through some of the visualisations that we've done and then show you a little bit about what's coming next, the next stages of the project for the next six months. So how did it all start? Well, basically we started off about a few months ago with Richard and Charles and Jeremy in a room and the brief was basically what does a blockchain look and sound like, which is quite a sort of abstract concept to be honest. We wanted to explain blockchain technology and look specifically at cryptocurrencies. No limitations, no restrictions. That was the brief. So the first step of undertaking this project as a studio was to try and sort of understand the blockchain. I mean, we are a design studio. We often work with different pieces of technology that we've never come in contact with. Blockchain was definitely one of those. We've never worked in this space before. It was very new to us. I, by no means, am a mathematician. So just as a word of warning, I may throw in some terminology now and again that is entirely misused and out of context, but hopefully you just get the general gist of what I'm trying to say. So yeah, so we kicked off basically with this period of time where we had to go in and investigate what the blockchain was. This is the whole team. Here's us just sort of throwing some ideas together, basically trying to decipher some of the technology, the implementation and just the concept of what makes the blockchain and how that impacts cryptocurrency. Yeah, and I'm going to say that after doing that, it feels like maybe one of the few design studios that actually can get their head around or talk about myrcal trees and such. So it's quite new. Once we sort of dove into that a little bit more, the next step as a design process is when you're doing data visualisation is to find the metaphor to an object, to a technology. It's really important for us in order to investigate technology and investigate whatever you're trying to represent. You need to find the narrative. You need to find a story. You need to find the metaphor through which you can use as a lens to understand, to critique whatever it is you're trying to display. So we went through many different angles and many different approaches to try and understand this, what it means, what are the technologies underpinning it. Some of the common terms that we kept coming across was these ideas of data as an immutable structure, as it has permanence. It exists and it has interconnectivity with other data structures. These were common threads and common terms that came up in the vernacular as we were investigating it. We wanted to sort of, it very much felt like this idea that these structures had a physicality to them and we hid upon this metaphor of crystal structures. This is very interesting because there's a lot of parallels between data structures in general. They have inherent properties. For example, in structures like this, there are internal chemical constituents that affect a broader macroscopic structure. The internal properties of what makes these has made these broader structures and it's only because of those internally. There's other things like they have, if you think about diamonds, diamonds have infractions inside them, inclusions that affect how they are viewed. These were brought about because of the process, because of the growth and where they came from. It tells a little story about where they came from and these are part of the story. Here's just some examples of the process we went through looking at all these different ways that crystals are represented and the shape and the range of them that all comes from these very fundamental underlying principles. Some more here. This is all just a sort of body of research that we're just trying to formulate this metaphor, this idea of what we could use. We wanted to explore the idea that maybe we could represent things inside the blockchain, inside blocks, using these metaphors so things like the scale of these objects or the value of the blockchain fees, how they might translate into physical properties such as the texture, the lighting, how it disperses light, all these things where they have these connections to the inputs of the data, to the outputs of a visual and sound-based structure. Having looked at this idea of this metaphor and latched onto that in a certain sense, we started to extend upon that, this idea of encapsulating or encoding data within an entity, within a physical permanent structure and placing, positioning, frozen in time, pieces that could be looked at and viewed at in isolation. For example, when a block gets created, it can be moved, it can be held, it can be transacted, it moves around. We found it a very interesting idea to explore and there's some other aspects to it. This is a few pieces of work by an artist called Jack Storm, these two here in the corner. He's an incredible artist, he has nothing to do with cryptocurrency or data structures, however we kind of latch upon this idea that there's these different elements and components that you can view that you can see within this object. I'll talk a little bit more about him later because he's some interesting work he's doing and here's some more examples here, the idea of objects encased and encapsulated in a physical entity. Having moved on from this idea of using this metaphor, using this encoded structures, using crystals as a metaphor, we started prototyping and fleshing out the idea. We started looking at visual explorations of it all, like motion, giving structures mass and what that might correlate to, the idea that transactions might have weight, how they affect other things, how that has effects later on in the network and how we can convey that through things like movement. Another concept is this idea of connectivity, although maybe data structures exist independently, they may have correlations and connectivity between them and how we might be able to express that without linking them directly, we might be able to encapsulate them in something, show some sort of membrane around them that itself communicates an idea of togetherness or how they correlate. That's some more ideas. Sound, of course, is a big part of what we do, let's just see if we can play this here. All of this came about from the idea that it's supposed to be a symphony of the blockchain. The sound, obviously, has to be a big part of it. Here we're looking at these ideas, how those properties translate to things like resonance, what does a block sound like, if it has internal properties that are reflected by data, if you hit it, what does it sound like and how we might translate that. We've done many different routes, and this is just some of the research work that we hit upon. After that, we moved into the prototyping stage. This is where we actually got our tools out and started putting things together and seeing how things worked and how things fit together. It's all well and great having this metaphor and having an idea of how you might represent it, unless you can actually test that against real data, it's just an abstraction. It's just a story really. Here we've actually started connecting to the Bitcoin network. This is really dark, but hopefully you can see a bit of that. We have used Houdini. Houdini, if you don't know, is a 3D modelling tool. It's really quite an amazing piece of kit. It has a lot of parallels with functional programming in the fact that you create geometry in a node-based environment, and that fact is like you're actually modelling the flow of data. You take inputs and you model the flow of data and you end up with some sort of output. Here we actually wrote a plug-in for Houdini that connects to Bitcoin and it pulls in data, real-time data, or data in the past, and it models it through this flow, through this process, and it ends up with some different varied outputs. Here is an example. It's a video. Here what we're doing is this is a block that we're looking at. All these individual shards are transactions within that block and it's distributed over a sphere. This is just a very early prototyping, just smashing together different ideas and getting some output. It's very stochastic in its nature. It's quite random. We're just seeing if we can get a proof of concept working. We then extended that to some sort of renders. You can't quite see it here, but it's quite interesting. It may be not exactly what we're looking for, but this idea that you have this block, you have these transactions in it where the height of them represent the value of that transaction, you can very quickly read this. You can understand something about it, not in detail, but you can understand there's a lot of transactions or there's however many there might be. We really like that idea that you can quickly get a gauge of some data structure. This is another one. Again, very early prototype work where we are doing the same thing where we're distributing transactions over a disk. We're using the height of them by the value again. However, again, it's fairly random in nature, but we still think it's quite interesting. Then some more outputs that renders. It's interesting how you start seeing all these internal reflections and how different transactions might have properties that affect how the light propagates through the volume. It's quite interesting. The end of this is we ended up in this sort of space. This is not a block. This is basically a day in the blockchain. We landed upon this because there's something nice about having this spiral. The idea of the blockchain is it's a link's list. It just moves backwards in time. A revolution in that spiral is a day. You have this idea that you can look at it and quickly gauge the distribution of blocks, how they were positioned, the size of them, the scale of them. You can look at this and see in that day something happened, something occurred and what that was. This is where we finally landed. We've got some early tests of how that might look like as an animated entity. We also went through some applications of how we might apply UI elements of it. The big thing to this is it's quite a complex thing to convey. Even when you make it look beautiful, you still need some supporting copy, some supporting documentation to explain this, explain what you're looking at. Basically, just to summarise and recap where we came from. This is basically the process we came from. We're really excited to have gone on this journey with IOHK and the creator team Richard. We will be launching Symphony today. I'm going to take you through a little walkthrough of where we ended up. We went into a build phase and here we have basically the symphony of blockchains. This is going to go live on the IOHK website. It's basically a web-based experience. You can see this online. You can view this on your mobile and your desktop. Here you can see what we have is again the distribution of blocks in a circle and a spiral. All these blocks represent real blocks in the blockchain. You can navigate down the history of the blockchain all the way through time back to the inception, back to the genesis block. There's an ambient sound happening that is represented of the hash rate that's involved on that day. The amount of input and the amount of processing that was involved. You can select blocks and pull them out from the spiral and view them. Here we're viewing the Merkel tree, which is a binary tree as I'm sure many of you know and it doesn't have any sort of dimensionality. However, we're using concepts from the block, properties inside the block like the fees, the ratio of the fees that are involved to the value of it, trying to approximate how expensive it was to create or mine this block. We're using that as ways to affect how those trees grow. Each block looks fundamentally different and has a different growth pattern inside it. Again, it's not maybe immediately readable, but you can immediately tell that sometimes you get very distorted and contorted tree structures. Sometimes you get very beautiful ornate ones and these are all indicative of properties of those blocks. There is also the sound element from this as well as based upon the transactions themselves in the blocks. The transactions occur over time and the sounds propagate and they build up. Sometimes you get very interesting things because when the blocks are generated a lot of the transactions are grouped together. It actually does reveal something interesting about that. That is going live on the IHK on the website. We're really excited to work with the team to build that. You can go and have an explore and we'd love to get your feedback on what you think about it. We're going to be moving forward that in the next few months. I'm going to take a little bit of time to talk about what's next because obviously we talk about this idea of the symphony and what we see here is very much like the first movement of that symphony. It's very interesting. We found that common language to it but we need to go further. We need to do more. The most important thing is we want to give it utility. That really is the key thing to us. It looks great and it's very interesting as a visual and audio piece bit of art but unless we give it utility it's going to be meaningless. We want to allow people to actually look for blocks, look for dates and be able to traverse and be able to go to dedicated points in the history of the blockchain. The goal really is to create a tool in which we can compare cryptocurrencies. This is where it becomes really interesting because Bitcoin is fundamentally very different to Ethereum, to Cardano, to Iota and visualising them in a way that people can understand something about how they're different. Could be amazing and that's something we've not seen before. I think a lot of people understand there's different currencies but they don't understand the difference between them unless you know the technical implementation. So having a way to compare them is going to be amazing. The idea that you can look at this Bitcoin and you can see here's this dark ominous sound and you might be able to look at another currency and it might be bright and vibrant. The colours might look different. It'll make people ask those questions. What makes those different? Why are those currencies different? I think it could provide a really interesting way to explore that problem. Of course Ada, we're really excited we're going to be working with the team and the Cardano team as well to bring Ada to the platform over the next six months. We are also going to be implementing Iota and Ethereum. All of this is going to be available open source on GitHub so we're hoping that's going to provide the community with a tool that they can fork this and actually create their own and submit it back but that's going to be really interesting too. We also want to do a VR experience. Again it's very dark but the natural thing behind this is that by using these metaphors of scale and size to a block by putting it on the screen you're taking a step away from it. If you've actually seen something in VR being within a room of a large scale is quite a physical response to that because it's quite intimidating to get claustrophobia. So having things like where we can present the scale of a block or as a monolith and stand next to it in size would be incredible. It allows you to read it a little bit easier and also allowing people to sort of co-presence so people can actually navigate the space in pairs or in a group and actually analyse and look at these things and potentially like send transactions to each other would be really great. Jack Storm again this is the artist that I discussed earlier. He's just very incredible. We've been speaking and we've been in discussions with him. He was hopefully going to have a meeting with us and the creative team as he's really keen to kind of start helping making some of these physical entities together. Every time we talk about it it's a physical thing so I think it's important that it would be that we do actually create this somehow and I think that's going to be that could be really beautiful. We'd like to develop this and further into a sort of an exhibition all these disparate ideas around this space of exploring the blockchain and cryptocurrency. We'd like to formalise into a touring exhibition that we can take to places like the Guggenheim hopefully. It's something that we think there's so many avenues to explore and there's such a body of work that we can do so it's really exciting and that's it. Thank you for coming and if anybody does really want to come and chat to us we're here as a team at Coover so we'd love to take the opportunity while we're in a room and while we're all in the same space in Lisbon to actually discuss this a little bit more. So thanks.