Datascapes 2.0 app for iPhone and iPad

This app is inspired by a simple idea. Nature and Culture are replete with patterns. Those patterns can be detected and appropriated to create new works of art.

This is not a new idea. The Canadian media theorist Harold Innis referred to this process of detection and re-packaging as the Oral Tradition. The Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin saw the same process at work in the history of the modern novel. According to Bakhtin, the French novelist François Rabelais used to routinely canvass Paris markets looking for fresh modes of expression coming from vendors seeking to sell their wares. For Rabelais, the street market was an evolutionary pool of new forms of expression, forms that he incorporated into his master work, Gargantua and Pantagruel.

In our project, we seek to follow in Rabelais’ footsteps, with a few twists. Instead of producing a novel, we present two works of landscape art, art that will be featured in the app. Instead, of drawing on oral forms produced from French street vendors, we draw on patterns derived from protein and text data, patterns that have been translated into musical and visual forms. And instead of producing works that are expressed in the medium of print, we present in the first instance two pieces – “Emergence” and “The Five Senses” – that are expressed in the medium of Augmented Reality. The works are generated to be rendered on top of printed or displayed QR Codes. The QR Code for each movement is available from the project website (https://www.edgehill.ac.uk/computing/csdh/)