| Concept |
| Our concept behind LIFE24 is more that just a visual stimulance. As we mentioned before, we wanted to create a kind of world awareness in the here and now. We wanted to translate these sources in a visual way, so you can see and observe the given information, much faster, easier, and productive. You get a sense of a living world, than just a static view like, a newspaper for example. The perception of news, also plays a big part in our project. You'll see the different views on "news" depending on the various countries and their cultures. All the news we as a viewer are given are nationally accepted as a kind of truth. When often the news "fed" to other countries is very different. Our project tries to give a more objective view on the news. Ironic isn't it? In order to kind of globalize international news and events, we turn back to the views and morals of the individual. It's like the band Rage against the machine, fighting "against the system". They got a massive following which made them part of that same commercial system they where fighting against in the first place. A vicious circle. As mentioned before, the virtual map is very different than the geographical map. The availability of webcams in 3rd world countries is nothing compared to the modern western world. Also the virtual world doesn't care about the oceans of the physical world, which deforms the virtual borders a lot. Just for the viewer's recognition we used the physical world map as a basis.
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| Process |
If you'd step back and watch the first two weeks of the Making art of databases course, the word orientation pops up. After listening to the various speakers, our group was formed. The three of us connected very well, which speeded up the brainstorming thing, and narrowed this step down to, let's say one day. We knew what we wanted. Creation of world awareness. How? By using various online sources and create a world map of (webcam) images and various news feeds (RSS). This world map is made on a grid of 24 vertical slots by 15 horizontal slots. The 24 vertical slots give a visual interpretation of the 24 hours we all love so much. The 15 horizontal slots is still a mistery to the three of us. By giving the various sources a destination, we could make a living world map.
Example: Our feed is in a small place called Incredible-dull town somewhere North of Australia. So the feed's origin can be found in sector 3,1 . These coordinates are fed to the XML file along with all the other feeds.
The following weeks were more productive. Joey was writing the script for all the feeds to work together and Maurice and Chris searched for various webcam sources. The first problems started to emerge. Now don't be alarmed, no blood was shed. It just seemed that a big portion of the inhabited world is, webcam-less. Well, there are webcams, Just not the free and descent ones are nowhere to be found. Let's just say, you need a creditcard and a very high libido. This is the part where the RSS news feeds kick in. A big part of Russia doesn't have live visuals of some cities. So we filled the empty Russian slots with news feeds. The same formula was used for a numerous other countries I can't even pronounce.
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