Part 1 - Organism 25% Delivered by Chris Speed

organism n. 1. any living animal or plant including any bacterium or virus. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations
2. anything resembling a living creature in structure, behavior, etc —-, organ’ismal or,organ’ismic adj. organ’ismally adv.

‘The artificial purification of all milieus, atmospheres, and environments will supplant the failing internal immune systems. If these systems are breaking down it is because an irreversible tendency called progress pushes the human body and spirit into relinquishing its systems of defense and self-determination, only to replace them with technical artifacts. Divested of his defenses, man becomes eminently vulnerable to science. Divested of his phantasies, he becomes eminently vulnerable to psychology. Freed of his germs, he becomes eminently vulnerable to medicine.

It would not be too far-fetched to say that the extermination of mankind begins with the extermination of germs.’ [ Jean Baudrillard ]

‘We are becoming like cats, slyly parasitic, enjoying an indifferent domesticity. Nice and snug in the social, our historic passions have withdrawn into the glow of an artificial coziness, and our half-closed eyes now seek little other than the peaceful parade of television pictures. Perhaps our eyes are merely a blank film which is taken from us after our deaths to be developed elsewhere and screened as our life story in some infernal cinema or dispatched as microfilm into the sidereal void.’ [Jean Baudrillard ]

‘Artificial Intelligence: the art of making computers that behave like the ones in movies.’ [Bill Bulko]

Working in pairs generate “a living creature in structure, behavior, etc…”. The final organism should be a form of interactive media, able to work on any platform from mobile, desktop, internet, ipod etc. The intention is to make the organisms accessible on a web site so the shockwave movie should be embedded in its own web page. This will have a dramatic effect on the size of your organism, be realistic.
The rational behind this exercise?:

A: to generate a problem which is not technology driven, i.e. the idea drives the project. You should not start working on the computer until the ‘life forms’ spec is generated. You will then have to find ways of realising it within the limits of the technology.

B: to force you to consider a truly timebased, multidimensional, interactive problem. A life form needs to feed and be fed, sleep, move, multiply, expel waste etc. It will be sensitive to certain conditions and have a life expectancy. Do not use buttons, instead concentrate on a process of interactions. In defining a life form do not fall into the trap of using cartoon characters, question existing models, redefine and innovate! What is digital life?

For this project I’ve been looking at using different forms of website APIs to use as the generative content behind the project. I feel these APIs are very powerful and useful in the future for a number of applications. It seems a better idea to work on what will be the driving force in this project first, then see what can be built from it rather than the other way round.

At first I looked at using the rather new Facebook API which would allow the user to ‘install’ the application and then, using the content such as the person’s details, RSS news feeds, friends data or even a view count system to generate the output. I quite like this idea as I think the Facebook API would be very helpful in the future judging by the size of the website and it could become quite viral if done right due to the typical userbase, but then again I’m not 100% sure if this project would be suitable for the website as a Facebook application.

Another API I could use is the Digg one. This would allow me to use data such as the recently submitted stories, which category, user and more to be the generative content. Although it seems quite limited, the data does not have to be used literally in a sense that a category could represent one of a type of activity where for example if four stories were submitted to that category, then that would trigger that activity four times. At the moment I’m slightly leaning towards this because I feel that there is always going to be some generative content from the API and it could be used at a more simplistic level compared to the other ideas which would be better in the long run.

One of the high end flash applications created using the Digg API

The Flickr API doesn’t seem too suitable because it would mainly deal with images, which would be very hard to define as quantative data. It’s still an idea but I don’t see what I could make of it.

I also had the idea of using music to generate some sort of visualisation but I don’t think Chris was too keen on the idea as it doesn’t seem to be as generative and user based as the rest of the ideas. Also, it would be a good idea to get inside the technologies of APIs because it would be a good skill to know especially in a marketing sense for a company as the organism could be seen in a viral marketing sense, or even any application relating to a popular websites API.