Information
Julian Oliver >
»Packet Garden«, 2006 - 2006
Co-Workers & Funding:
Arnolfinihttp://www.selectparks.net/~julian/pg/
Technology
Software
News 29-07-07: Packet Garden 1.0 now runs on Ubuntu 7.04 ('Feisty'). Thanks to Pix for spotting the shift to Python2.5. Join us in the IRC channel #packetgarden on irc.freenode.net to get support and suggest features
Descriptions & Essays
Packet Garden captures information about how you use the internet and uses this stored information to grow a private world you can later explore.
To do this, Packet Garden takes note of all the servers you visit, their geographical location and the kinds of data you access. Uploads make hills and downloads valleys, their location determined by numbers taken from internet address itself. The size of each hill or valley is based on how much data is sent or received. Plants are also grown for each protocol detected by the software; if you visit a website, an 'HTTP plant' is grown. If you share some files via eMule, a 'Peer to Peer plant' is grown, and so on.
None of this information is made public or shared in any way, instead it's used to grow a personal landscape, a kind of 'walk-in graph' uniquely shaped by the way you use the internet. With each day of network activity a new world can be generated, each of which are stored as tiny files for you to browse, compare and visit as time goes by. You can think of packet gardens as pages from a network diary.
Literature
Oliver, Julian. »Perceptual Play: Optical Illusion Art as Radical Interface.« .
Oliver, Julian. »The Game is Not the Medium ... or "How To Ignore the Shiny Box"?.« .
Oliver, Julian. »Buffering Bergson: Matter and Memory in 3D Games.« .
Oliver, Julian. »The Similar Eye: Proxy Life and Public Space.« In Computer Gambes and Digital Cultures Conference Proceedings, edited by . : Tampere University Press, 2002.
Julian Oliver. »Polygon Destinies: The Production of Place in the Digital Role-Playing
Game.« In COSIGN 2001 Conference Proceedings, edited by . Melbourne Victoria, Australia: Julian Holland Oliver Interactive Information Institute RMIT University,, 2000.
Exhibitions & Events