Or if you prefer it in Quicktime flavor:
Social Synthesizer. 3 min. video documentation.

The core of the SOCIAL SYNTHESIZER is a real-time score generation application based on concepts ranging from Swarm-Intelligence (SI), hash table mathematics, Database Theory and datamining techniques. The Real-Time-Score-Generator is a technological mashup of custom built software that leverages digital audio synthesis with polyphonic video synthesis techniques to power an immersive yet sublime environment capable of inducing higher states of information awareness.

Database organization patterns as a compositional strategy: the Real-Time-Score-Generator simulates the emerging qualities of the organization of data in databases. Like a virtual petri dish, it intimately links the technology of the online world with the biological concepts of our natural world. Data organization patterns become the score for an ever-growing self-organizing stream of collective art. One in which the entire internet community can witness the evolution of, as well as participate in and influence. Its power is in its ability to convey information in multiple levels and dimensions: a specular lens into the world of online communities.

Online, SOCIAL SYNTHESIZER uses a wide range of audio synthesis techniques on a database of user contributed recordings to algorithmically compose music. The community can influence the sound of the compositions by inserting sound recordings into the database. This is accomplished by using Skype (a software program that allows users to make free calls over the Internet) and calling to what is essentially a contemporary answering machine. The recordings become a part of an algorithmic computer generated stream of music that anybody can listen to and influence. Onsite, the SOCIAL SYNTHESIZER processes in real-time images drawn from Flickr (a website for users to share photographs). The archetypical images drawn from an user contributed content website such as Flickr become universal yet personal meaningful data that are reprocessed by an acoustically driven visual synthesizer.

Damining the collective unconscious: Datamining is the ensemble of techniques geared towards the extraction of processable knowledge implicit in databases. The same way that datamining techniques explore and research databases to extract hidden, previously unknown information, the immersion in the SOCIAL SYNTHESIZER’s audiovisual composition is a sensorial experience that allows the public to explore the internet’s global repository of collective memory and the intuitive extraction of the online community collective unconscious.

The SOCIAL SYNTHESIZER is ultimately a sensitive content development system. It epitomizes the conjunction of creativity through diversity in an open media culture. Information as media, information as real-time collective art that, at the same time, can become personally relevant and highly subjective. Social Synthesis.

SOCIAL SYNTHESIZER_PROTOTYPE processes in real-time audio recordings made with Skype (instructions on how to use Skype here). SOCIAL SYNTHESIZER’s Skype user name is aether.bits.

You can see here all the images that the SOCIAL SYNTHESIZER_PROTOTYPE is currently processing in real-time. You can know the author of each photography by clicking on the thumbnails.