The internet is a place of data exchange
and information processes. The World Wide Web, its "user friendly"
face, adds to that the chance for day to day users to communicate and
interact in several, sometimes fractured ways. These range from singular,
person to person channels such as email and chats, to collaborative aproaches
like web forums, newsgroups and others. A common user of such media will
normally access a web forum for general information or discussion, email
and chat systems for a more "personal", direct connection to
the other.
A typical internet user, a singular person in real life, becomes in this
way multiple on the web, as the common use of nicknames and simulated
personas show. The potentially complex web of interconnections of one
person with other persons, subjects, projects and areas of knowledge is
fragmented into simpler, more manageable communicative units.
InterMaps' attempt is to provide a plattform for online community making
that is able to articulate the different layers of communicative complexity
we commonly use on the web back into a single relational entity, the user.
This project is about finding out the ways InterNet can support and modify
social interaction. You can email friends, subscribe to specific subjects
or create your own forums and invite people to participate. You can later
on see all that on a visual map to understand in which ways you relate
to others on the internet though personal contact and also though the
topics that interest you.
The project provides an interface to visually display these networks as they develop on time and complexity. The interface allows you to filter the data by different criteria, expressing general qualities about relationships such as closeness, affinity and frequency.
These relationships work on several levels: the network of people a user is involved in through a built-in messaging system, and the different projects and general subjects a user might be involved in. This opens the possibility to combine different criteria as a multi-leveled community- building tool. In this way InterMaps can contain simultaneous networks of people, organizations and projects that will intersect or grow apart according to the criteria used to observe it.
These networks are always built from the point of view of the user, meaning that the user is the center and starting point of each network. This is how every network will be unique even if they share elements.
Through her network, a user can find people and subjects (projects) related to her that she wasn’t aware of, understand the nature and structure of that relation and learn about the items found.
The project includes a regular html interface to keep track of singular contacts, send and receive messages and administer user’s profile and privacy preferences, which can be changed at any time.
InterMaps is commissioned for Medienkunstnetz
(MKN) in cooperation with ZKM
and Mecad, Barcelona..
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