ALMMOLSITN (and let my message of love shine into the night) Is an interactive art work proposed for public media facades. Participants claim single pixels from the display as their own private, colourful, morse code, message board. Shown here is a mock up of the proposed installation for the facade at Medialab Prado
ALMMOLSITN invites participants to send their messages of undying love to the display along with the coordinates of their chosen pixel. That pixel then transmits their message in morse code in a loop until the end of the festival. Active pixels are selected at random and translated on the top panel of the facade. At the beginning of the festival, the entire screen will be black and over the course of days the screen will be taken over, pixel by pixel, by messages strobing in morse in rainbow colours.
background concept
media facades are used as carriers of messages, often commercial sometimes artistic but almost always explicit. ALMMOLSITN exploits the structure of the screen by breaking down the illusion of wholeness and celebrating in the liberation of tiny agents. Pixels which were previously in service to the whole now, with the help of lovers, find their voice.
Burj Babil from tom schofield on Vimeo.
Burj Babil is video installation showing the destruction of a fictionalised Tower of Babel. It was made in processing and 3D Studio Max.
The direct indexical relationship between text and material is not only structurally embedded in the computer systems which manage, facilitate and entertain us, but rests in a history of science, belief, law and magic. While text is compiled in machine code, enacting the processes which turn on our street lights, render our videos and send data packets to the server, older societies performed other enactments of text, containing their own syntax and lexis. Religion, sorcerers, alchemists, writers of constitutions brought forth, with hubristic self-certainty, the world as we know it; spells, gold and human rights in that order. Burj Babil (Tower of Babel) is a video installation work. To create the tower, the source code file has been subjected to a number of transformation processes which corrupt and destroy the tower in different phases. The processes transform the vertex and face coordinates from the source code file into ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange 2) characters. The results are then fed into the google translate api. Most of the file is ignored since the sequence of characters do not correspond to real words. However when chance causes the ASCII sequence to form a recognizable word this will cause a corresponding physical translation of that vertex point. The resultant corrupted code is then used to re-make the model causing its eventual collapse. The final result of this process is a number of video sequences showing the destruction of the tower as its source code file is translated into different languages.
null by morse from tom schofield on Vimeo.
Overview
A series of messages are send using an antique morse signalling lamp. The messages refer to the inter-related histories of morse code, disaster and war and include the final transmissions of the titanic and the first ever message publicly sent via morse' "what hath God wrought?". The messages can be decoded via an android app and are also displayed on a projection in the exhibition space. After the performance the signal lamp is left in place and participants are able to send their own messages.
sticking point is a data visualisation project built in php and openframeworks and comes in two parts.
The larger print of the two prints draws on constitutional documents which include not only constitutions themselves but such documents as revolutionary manifestos, bills of rights, peace treaties etc. The Office For the High Commission of Human Rights at the United Nations defines a number of key themes or areas of human rights which are delineated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights - a document conceived shortly after the Second World War. In the print, the context of those words is traced through history through around two hundred documents in English translation.
Participants use a sliding library ladder to view the higher parts of the print
Each year has a colour code so it is possible to trace follow the references to different themes in the same year through different documents. The curves join together documents from the same country.
The smaller print is a visualisation of distinct words in the sections of 75 world constitutions which pertain to fundamental rights, freedoms duties and obligations of citizens.
Each circle represents a single country. The words are arranged around a circle and are in order of significance. This significance is judged by how often each word occurs in this country's constitution in comparison to other countries' constitutions. The lines and circles together form a graph of that significance. Finally the curves link together words which appear in more than one constitution.
newsGlobe from tom schofield on Vimeo.
newsGlobe is a live visualisation of the geographical spread of news stories in the top five UK online new sources.
References to cities or countries are marked on a large (2m) globe. The coverage of news sources can be compared to countries with which Britain has or has had a colonial relationship. newsGlobe was created to investigate to what extent our new focus correlates with our colonial past.
