Every now and then I’m lucky enough to come across someone creating a piece of new media where you can instantly tell that there is something going on here.
Stop and think about the last thing you saw that really grabbed your attention and sucked you in on a level beneath “that was pretty cool.” You can see the gears moving and find yourself connecting or interacting with it on a different level. It is mysterious. It is difficult to quantify. It is what I imagine it was like to be lucky enough to walk into a certain gallery in Paris in 1871 and seeing this renegade thing called Impressionism. Or, a little closer to home, being in the room the first time someone fired up PONG and realizing that this was a new kind of experience and associated set of emotional responses your brain didn’t have a place to file away just yet.
Take my recent exposure to flickrvision.
There is something undeniably arresting about just watching this thing click by and thinking, “gosh, there go little bits of people’s lives all around the world flashing past.”
You’re seeing the photos people upload to flickr LIVE, and you’re seeing them appear over a map of the earth where they reside.
On a practical level, you can look at this and say “that’s an interesting application of the Google Maps API and a pretty nifty little mash-up.” Or you can even approach it from a broader perspective and think, “what an interesting visualization tool” and just leave it at that.
But on some level that can’t be ignored, part of watching this thing for a period of time is about this thought:
This must be kind of what it’s like to be God.
This was more than likely not the intention of David Troy when he created the application. But it’s a powerful effect, and something that captured my attention completely. The sister application “Twittervision” is in some ways even deeper, since it takes you beyond the realm of seeing through the eyes of these little specks on planet Earth, and into their heads.
This is the kind of effect media can have. It seldom achieves this and probably seldom aspires to achieve it. But it’s there. We should think about that.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
One Response:
November 6th, 2007 at 8:52 pm
I have sat there and just let Flickrvision run and run, not even really looking at the images, just watching it update. Tick, tick, tick. I imagine this would be one of the giant wall monitors in the lair of the evil genius. Must… constantly… track… data…
On the topic of Flickr and interesting ways to play with it, I noticed that Airtight (just one guy?) has done a fun little number with TiltViewer. Very simple, but satisfying and fresh.
http://www.airtightinteractive.com/projects/tiltviewer/app/