[spectre] clouds of clouds

[miguel leal]

hi andreas


Nice project. I've just sent an e-mail to Douglas Bagnall, looking  
for some kind of cooperation. We can probably intclude 'his' clouds  
in our 'clouds of clouds'.


best of all


miguel



On 24Sep2008, at 7:57 AM, Andreas Broeckmann wrote:

> hey miguel,
>
> this project should cooperate with this:
>
> http://cloudy.halo.gen.nz/
>
> regards,
> -a
>
>
>
>> Dear all
>>
>> Our new web project is already on-line. Please report any bug.  
>> Comments are also welcome.
>>
>> Txs
>>
>> ml
>>
>>
>> ===========================
>> CLOUDS OF CLOUDS
>> by Miguel Leal and Luis Sarmento
>> ===========================
>>
>> http://www.virose.pt/clouds_of_clouds
>>
>> Clouds of clouds is a random generator of cloud images. Each new  
>> cloud is unique and indexed to a particular time (GMT) on a  
>> particular day.
>>
>> Clouds of Clouds was developed in Perl + MySQL. It works over a  
>> database of more than 1.000.000 photos of clouds.
>> Photo information was gathered from Flickr between September 10-13  
>> 2008, using Flickr API.
>> The database will be regularly updated.
>>
>> Clouds of clouds is a web-based project comissioned for Interact  
>> 15 [http://www.interact.com.pt/].
>> The project was produced between July and September 2008.
>>
>> hosted by virose.pt
>>
>>
>>
>> ______________________
>>
>> "This is randomness, and that is altogether different. If  
>> absolutely necessary, you can count the stars. A catalogue has  
>> been kept of them since Antiquity. But if you ask for a catalogue  
>> of the clouds, people laugh at you. There is no such term as  
>> cloud, defined as permanent, defined by its borders, by its terms  
>> or its terminations. [Š] Clouds, whirlwinds, flows, noises, all  
>> primary masses without qualities."
>>
>>  (M. Serres)
>>
>>
>>
>> Chaos theories, as they have emerged in strength since the 1960s,  
>> with their focus on complexity, were in fact an answer to the  
>> monstrous and misshapen nature of certain phenomena that were  
>> revealed to be resistant to determinist equations or to the laws  
>> of causality. Atmospheric phenomena such as clouds have always  
>> been seen as an image of the inability to submit certain realities  
>> to precise measurement. To all intents and purposes, clouds  
>> appeared to be a perfect example of irreducibility, instability  
>> and unpredictability. Clouds, in their apparent causal  
>> disjunction, like a whirlwind or vortex, represented the  
>> principles of error, exception and monstrosity.
>>
>> Perhaps this is why there have never been dreams of an individual  
>> cloud catalogue, since it would be so absurd. If we ask anybody  
>> for something similar, we risk being ridiculed, as Michel Serres  
>> recalls. Clouds are instantly fleeting and have no number or  
>> stable form. They exist now and no longer exist a moment later. We  
>> can classify the clouds approximately, order them by type or try  
>> to understand their signs but we have no way of archiving them.
>>
>> The exponential growth of Web files, particularly with the  
>> participative forms that Web 2.0 has made common, has finally  
>> brought us an embryo for these absurd archives, and not only for  
>> clouds. Everything that has always been firmly uncataloguable  
>> seems to have found its place in the distributed digital archives.
>>
>> At the same time, curiously, we have an increasing popularity in  
>> recent years for terms such as Cloud Computing, Cloud  
>> Architecture, Data Clouds, Text Clouds or Tag Clouds, in what  
>> represents the attribution of a new semantic power to our idea of  
>> a cloud. Particularly on the web, with the explosion of social  
>> networks, it has become common to use similar devices to organise  
>> meta-information generated by users.
>>
>>
>> Clouds of clouds is a random generator of cloud images. Each new  
>> cloud is unique and indexed to a particular time (GMT) on a  
>> particular day. Its clouds were made on similar dates and at  
>> similar times, not necessarily the same year, and are linked to  
>> the original web pages.
>>
>> The basis of the archives are all images indexed with the tags  
>> <cloud> or <clouds> on Flickr.
>>
>> These are not clouds in the atmospheric meaning of the word, but  
>> instead entities with which they share a complexity that can be  
>> confused with instability, unpredictability and irreducibility.  
>> That this is based on a relatively simple visualisation  
>> arrangement is another way of indicating that this complexity  
>> depends less on what we see on the surface than on the networks of  
>> relationships established from it.
>>
>> The clouds generated by the users are kept in searchable archives.  
>> These archives will grow with the project and are intended to  
>> become, over time, veritable daily, monthly, yearly archives of  
>> clouds. Clouds of clouds also works as a type of infinite nesting  
>> doll: clouds within clouds, archives within archives.
>>
>> Clouds of clouds is a project by Miguel Leal and Luís Sarmento
>>
>>
>> __________________________
>>
>>
>> ..................................................................... 
>> ...
>>
>> *Virose Organization*
>> *Porto.Portugal*
>> *http://www.virose.pt | http://arch.virose.pt*
>> e-zine vector: http://www.virose.pt/vector
>> ..................................................................... 
>> ...
>>
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>