Level: Introductory
Duane Merrill (duane@duanemerrill.com), Writer, Freelance
08 Aug 2006
Updated 16 Oct 2006
Mashups are an exciting genre of interactive Web applications that draw upon content retrieved from external data sources to create entirely new and innovative services. They are a hallmark of the second generation of Web applications informally known as Web 2.0. This introductory article explores what it means to be a mashup, the different classes of popular mashups constructed today, and the enabling technologies that mashup developers leverage to create their applications. Additionally, you’ll see many of the emerging technical and social challenges that mashup developers face.
More dW content related to: mash up + architecture
In Le Catalogue, Yann Le Guenec has developed a public database of documentary images (an archive) of art projects which he created between 1990-1996. Every time an image is viewed, a horizontal line and a vertical line forming a cross are added; the image is then stored for access by another user. The more the images are accessed, the more they are abstracted or — if one is thinking of art conservation — destroyed.
Here, the archive is similar to analog vinyl records losing their fidelity, being slightly deteriorated every time the needle passes through the groove. Unlike a record player, however, which is fabricated with the aim to provide the least damage possible while offering an aesthetic experience for the user, Le Catalogue actually makes the most of destruction in order to create a unique image for the present user. The image is unique because each time the same file is accessed, two more lines will be added.
In this way, Le Catalogue reinterprets the idea of destruction as progress, bringing on the new. One can look forward to destruction as a type of online collaboration; the archived information is not preserved but rather reinterpreted as information constantly shifting. History is here dependent on linear traces that expose the instability of interpretation; much like tree rings, traces are left behind by the process, leaving us with an allegorical database presenting destruction as an inevitable part of life.
THE TANK and 8BITPEOPLES are pleased to present the Blip Festival, a four-day celebration of over 30 international artists exploring the untapped potential of low-bit videogame consoles and home computers used as creative tools. Familiar devices are pushed in new directions with startling results — Nintendo Entertainment Systems and Game Boys roaring with futuristic floor-stomping rhythms and fist-waving melody, art-damaged Sega hardware generating fluctuating and abstracted video patterns — and that’s only the beginning. An exploration of the chiptune idiom and its close relatives, the Blip Festival is the biggest and most comprehensive event in the history of the form, and will include daily workshops, art installations, and nightly music performances boasting an international roster larger and more far-reaching than any previous event of its kind. Small sounds at large scales pushed to the limit at high volumes — the Blip Festival is an unprecedented event that is not to be missed.
Abstract Digital art has expanded, challenged, and even redefined notions of public art and supported the concept of a networked commons. The nature of agency within online, networked “systems†and “communities†is crucial to these developments. Electronic networks enable exchange and collectivist strategies that can question existing structures of power and governance. Networks are public spaces that offer enhanced possibilities of interventions into the social world and of archiving and filtering these interventions over time in an ongoing process. Networked activism and tactical response as well as artistic practice that merges physical and virtual space and augments physical sites and existing architectures are among the practices that are important to the impact of digital public art on governance.
