Presentation of Virtual Entity at Furtherfield, HTTP Gallery

Coordinator: Alessandra Scapin, ale@furtherfield.org
Context: AOS and Reff residency in London
Date: February 25th 2011

Plan: The Virtual Entity Tryptic - Narration of the story of the project through a series of 3 computers (2 monitors plus 1 projector) and 3 posters.

Left monitor: soul command line application, possibility to create, edit and display souls, possibility to display all the entities whose soul is instantiated
Central projector: Fluxus real-time representation of the graphs representing the relations between the entities populating the database
Right monitor: access to the soul’s database via Django web application, possibility to create edit and display souls, possibility to display all the files having a soul

Left poster: ascii visualization of a soul of a file
Central poster: short manifesto explaining the theory behind the project, collage of words in minatory letter’s style
Right poster: screen-shot from Fluxus representing the database seen from a distance, which appears to be a unique entity composed of lines connecting other entities, the so called viral monster

Participation: when a visitor creates or edit a new soul in the database, the Fluxus visualization immediately displays the new entity (and any eventual relation with the rest) in the database of souls.

Space: one corner or a wall.

Tech spec: 3 computers, 2 monitors, 2 keyboards, 2 mouse, 1 projector, 3 posters. Part of the equipment will be provided by xname (beamer + 1 computer)

Budget: to be discussed, if any. Posters need to be made and printed.

Software: Virtual Entity Alpha (including Django application) to be released one week before the show.

Research: how to get Fluxus to receive in real-time information from the database. Although apparently possible, it might be very complicated. Prepare PLAN B if Fluxus experiment fails.

Plan B: if Fluxus fails, the two lateral monitors will stay the same, while the central one will run a shell script which visualizes all the souls in the database one after the other.

Furtherfield
Unit A2 Arena Design Centre
71 Ashfield Road
London N4 1NY
T +44(0)208 802 2827
M +44(0)7717 887923
www.furtherfield.org