His latest post is about another of his rapid-prototyping projects, where he created a cup using Processing, based on meteorological data. It looks slipshod to say the least, but those variations are caused by climate change, and they reveal a trend. It’s a particularly interesting example of data visualisation, an area which will only grow in importance.

The Guardian newspaper has published many articles over recent years on opening up data e.g. on Ordnance Survey maps and crime, the London datastore is perhaps the first for many cities in this country (see also Transport for London), and the recent publication of the COINS database on government spending could lead to some interesting work.

At an apparently more prosaic, or at least human scale, Jeremy Wood is a GPS artist capturing activities like mowing the lawn, on display at Tenderpixel in London until 22 June.

There is so much potential for digital artists to use this data (though being confident in the use of APIs is a hefty requirement). But [the teeming void] doesn’t just capture data in interesting ways. He writes about it too. His post on the underlying messages about data in a series of IBM commericals is fascinating, and highly recommended reading on the slyly manipulative approach.

The aesthetics of digital media flow from a related generality, where sound and image are encoded as fields of data. If a pixel is a number, an image is a grid of pixels, video a stream of images, and each of these numbers can take any value at all, then formally, an aesthetics of digital video is only a matter of finding the right values – fishing around in a space containing all possible digital video. If digital media creates this generalised space, anything at all, the media arts are faced with unavoidable questions: not only what to make – which values to choose, but how to choose them, and why?

It’s a subject that appears to fascinate the author of (the teeming void) because he’s touched on it several times before. I particularly like the phrase: “…the digital is just the analog operating within certain tolerances or threshholds.”