flash-communities

An art collective dedicated to generating spontaneous events designed to inspire a sense of humanistic unity among strangers.

Table of contents

• Table of contents
• 1. Epic story: facilitate flash-communities
• 2. Background
• 3. Initial vision and purpose
• 4. The art installation
  • 4.1. Common audio-visual patterns
  • 4.2. Elements within the installation
    • 4.2.1. Audio-visual projections sourced from participants' social media
    • 4.2.2. The Semantic Projector
    • 4.2.3. Indra's Net
• 5. Next steps
  • 5.1. Prioritize scope
  • 5.2. Define necessary tools, technologies, and skillsets
  • 5.3. Design solid privacy protection
• 6. License

1. Epic story: facilitate spontaneous group unity

As a Humanist,
I want to facilitate rapid communal bonds using personal, data-mined sounds and imagery,
In order to inspire spontaneous social unity among strangers.

2. Background

Unlike flashmobs — quick, public assemblies of people who engage in coordinated performances intended for outward-facing audiences — flash-communities are introverted events akin to family reunions, where members share a pot-luck of music, tweets, posts, videos, and images (all of which are anonymously and automatically data-mined from mobile devices). Projects focussed on flash-communities iteratively explore and experiment with the formation of minimally to non-hierarchical groups for goal-oriented enterprises.

3. Initial vision and purpose

Similar to some of Olafur Eliasson's work exploring humanity's relationship with geometry and space, and how these relationships affect the meaning of "public," flash-communities function to classify and transmit social media events as semantic networks that connect the participants directly and indirectly via shared nodes of emotion, proximity, and time.

My goal is to plot personal events (starting with social media "activity logs") to plot graphs expressed by the constituent sounds and images of the very media shared. Initial iterations of such graphs will likely culminate into a harmonic drone of sound based on the strongest edges within each graph, slowed and sustained as until a shared chorus has been achieved.

flash-communities as Temporary Autonomous Zones (TAZ)?

I'm revisiting the concepts behind the formation of TAZs, especially with "Music as an Organizational Principle." Like TAZs, flash-community events and projects share similar goals: to expose the invisible, unexamined emotional and intellectual nodes that bind and separate us as a means for identifying more cooperative pathways.

4. The art installation

The art installation essentially consists of social media imagery projected onto "Indra's Net" in a gradual upward motion, synchronized with audio sampled from the participants' social media.

4.1. Common audio-visual patterns

🚧 I'm still refining the audio-visual experience and narrative, but here's where I am so far.

Participants enter a room (inspired/informed by the work of Olafur Eliasson) and:

• 1. Beacons identify participants and queue their prepared media
• 2. Images begin to float from the floor to the ceiling, moving upward in chronological order
• 3. Intersections, unions, and associations among participants' data are sonically mapped and processed to create tones and chords
• 4. All media and song merge harmonically overhead to generate a unique "noosphere"

4.2. Elements within the installation

4.2.1. Audio-visual projections sourced from participants' social media

📱 ➡️ 💻 Media sourcing with prerequisite data-mining

As currently conceived, flash-communities will require a mobile app that participants must install and (transparently) link to their social media accounts. The mobile app anonymously gathers favorite songs, recent images, and other personal data in order to generate a coordinated presentation of meaningful life-events and facts to be shared and orchestrated during a flash-community event.

4.2.2. The Semantic Projector

The Semantic Projector originates from Brion Gyson, William S. Burroughs and Ian Sommerville's Dream Machine.

Rather than inducing hypnogogia via alpha-wave synchronization, however, this Semantic Projector would:

• House iBeacons used to identify participants' anonymized identifiers. (Since participants would initially gather around the Semantic Projector, audio-visual projections might suffer from less risk of ambient electrical noise.)
• Function as a middleware server connecting participants' anonymized identifiers with their social media
• Project oscillating images and lights from the central tower

4.2.3. Indra's Net

The semantic projector emits light on to "Indra's pearls", i.e., evenly separated, transparent beads threaded through "protams" (strings) hanging overhead. The pearls would serve dual purposes:

• Represent nodes in the generated semantic graph, including the illusion of "movement" and connectivity among nodes with oscillating light
• Reflect facets of projected images and motion pictures

The movement of light upward represents unity through growing luminosity synchronized with increasingly harmonic tones emerging from time-stretched loops sampled from the participants' favorite songs.

Orchestration principles behind the movement of sounds and images

Explore achieving harmonic resolution on principles behind Indra and the world column.

5. Next steps

• 5.1. Story-board a "best case" example
• 5.2. Plan contingencies for poor WiFi and Bluetooth signal-to-noise ratios (SNR)
  • 5.2.1. "Reservation-only" participation: identify the people participating in the installation and cache their social media data store locally on the Semantic Projector.
• 5.3. Identify the type of graph best suited to cumulative, ambient tonal resolution, starting with:
  • 5.3.1. Hypergraphs, whose "families of sets" could be easily mapped to sounds and images
  • 5.3.2. Conceptual graphs
• 5.6. Design the data store and its associations
• 5.7. Map audio and visuals (preferably in Key)
• 5.8. Identify and design visual surfaces that reflect or project images
• 5.9. Budget the whole damn thing 💸

5.1. Prioritize scope

• Based on feasibility and resources, determine whether to proceed.
• Gather materials for a prototype
• Build app and backend (will this require AI or machining learning?)
• Conduct tests

5.2. Define necessary tools, technologies, and skillsets

• Mobile app that mines social media audio-visual likes
• BaaS to store data
• Async backend agents that classify the media:
  • Chronologically
  • Geo-spatially
  • Music by
    • Genre
    • Key
    • ...
• Data-store, backend APIs, etc.

5.3. Design solid privacy protection

Privacy is paramount, and I will not proceed unless I feel confident about a data store and security risks.

Participants must be able to choose what not to be shared.

6. License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.