Net Art Commission 2002
by Boris Müller
The Proposal has received a Honorable Mention from the rhizome.org Net Art Commission.
The driving force of a community are people. The interface proposal »Sociotopic« aims at representing this. The context of all submissions by a member of a community creates a personal profile, enabling the system to establish a social and contextual space in which the submissions can be browsed.
One of the best ways to evaluate messages is simply by knowing the author of the message. A conversation is much more meaningful, if the participants know the interests, opinions and activities of everyone else. But once communities have reached a certain size, it becomes very difficult to get an idea of who the people in the community are. As the number of contributions in such a community is accordingly large, it is very important to create an opportunity for evaluating the relevance of a contribution.
The »Sociotopic« proposal addresses this problem. It aims at creating social and contextual spaces in which submissions of the community can be browsed.
Project Description:
Over time, members of the community submit a number of contributions.
Every contribution is indexed and categorized. So every message is a small, definite, contextual space.
As each of the contributions is a contextual space, the member is not only posting a message, she/he is also making a statement about her/his interests and activities.
Based on the contextual spaces, it is possible to generate a personal profile of the member.
These personal profiles enable the system to create relationships between the members.
A general contextual space is created, looking at the frequency and the relationships of all used keywords. The general contextual space is mapped to a 2D surface, creating the background for positioning the members of the community.
According to the contextual areas, representations of the members are now placed on the background. So a member can be located by the contextual background of keywords and categories. Furthermore, the positioning of the members forms groups of similar interests. This creates a public space, in which members of the community can form relationships with other members that have a similar profile.
The entire system will be very fluid and dynamic. As more and more contributions are submitted, the appearance of the space will change. New Groups will evolve, contextual areas will drift to new constellations.
Rollover: time 1 | time 2 | time 3
The system also takes account of the fact that some members submit frequently while others just take part once in a while. The on-screen presence of a member depends on her / his level of activity in the community.
The contributions can be accessed via the representation of the user, the icon. Here we have three members in front of a contextual space with a strong emphasis on video.
By clicking on the icon, the user can access all contributions of the member in chronological order.
The »Sociotopic« interface allows the members to find themselves in a wider context of people, topics and ideas.
Impressum
