CERN Data Visualization Systems, Geneva
Immersive computational systems exploring information complexity and invisible signals

Perspectives on modern informatics challenge the legacy literary structures of thought, transforming our understanding of information, energy, ecology and cooperation. In this age, static thinking, objects and certainties have given way to a continuous, dynamic scanning of natural and man-made signals, oscillating through multiple positions, interacting with complex problems through machine perception, multi-step processes, extended time-scales, and abstract pattern recognition. 

Radio-optic networks have displaced geography, releasing social and cultural processes through borderless communities and telepresence, exploring the boundaries and value systems of innovation and interaction. Reverberant media manifests in echo chambers, transaction engines proliferate high-frequency message transfer, meaning is ascribed through signal-to-noise ratio.

Information processing as we know it, is transcending the physical body, encoded in light pulse and energy exchange. Any data form, environmental, linguistic, visual, sonic or cosmic, can be manipulated and transformed through advanced synthesis and composition. As ubiquitous sensor domains sequence invisible data, advanced patterns of information are, increasingly opaque to unassisted human interpretation, evoking aesthetic experiences beyond our comprehension.

• How will we react to new informational abstractions ? 

The datascape explores how information becomes increasingly continuous, distributed and less confined to human-readable forms. As signals increase in density and velocity, meaning is progressively shaped through interactions between humans, machines and sensor networks. Human interpretability and human centrality gradually shift as cognition is distributed across hybrid and multi-agent environments.

At the interface

The shift and liberation toward dynamic, diversified forms of biological and synthetic intelligence, is in effect transferring evermore aspects of human attention span to exo-somatic, mediating technology. An integrated loop with expansive data-sets. What began as the technological enablement of connectivity and information flow, has evolved to a continuous assistance in defining the nature of information, knowledge and creativity. 

• What am I being told ?
• Who, or what is telling me ?
• What is the source ?

The new order of information technology communicates with itself, increasingly placing the human outside continuous informational loops, relegated to discrete interface access and challenging the human role in information exchange. The human node is increasingly integrated within a system composed of myriad signal sources, sensors and autonomous agents, orchestrated in the radio-optic sphere.

• How far out of the loop may we be pushed ? 

In the coming waves of human-technology interaction, function and efficiency transition to physical, emotional and immersive experience. A greater intimacy with the senses, connected to the informational rhythms of everyday life. A signal from across the globe can already offer more meaning than a physical engagement. With an increasing convergence of information exchange, consciousness and telepresence, experience may be recorded and replayed on demand. Augmented vision accessing granular environmental data, enhanced auditory systems discerning complex sound structures, synthetic skin detecting subtleties in textural range. As our neuro-plastic behaviors adapt to new interfaces, morphological choice and mandate will enable continuous response and embodied interaction.

The electronic interfaces with which we now live need not be mediated by close-up devices. The expansion of audio-visual, haptic and socio-informatic spaces will realize 360 degree conditions. Virtual compositions with malleable characteristics, evolving ambience and impulse response, impossible to realize in the physical domain. Immense activity bands tuning the invisible and assisting the body in giving way to an immersive awareness of interconnected environments. As interaction moves off-device, as physical space moves toward interaction, future zones offer augmented and parallel realities, with new forms of cooperative life.

In the emergence of inter-agent techno-social environments, systemic, auto-generative programming shapes an environment of continuous information production. Sensor architectures, nanotechnology and intelligent agents operate at the intersection of biological and electronic life. Super-scale projects are choreographed by swarm intelligence, while human response adapts to the discrete operations of evolved algorithms.

Ars Electronica & Futurelab environments, Linz
Explorations of informational ecologies, sensory interaction and immersive computation.