Defragmentation’s process aims at reducing the fragmentation of data by concatenating parts stored in separate locations: a (partially) new visualisation interface made its apparition on R-Echos; its url is: http://r-echos.net/defragmentation/
It’s quite simple, and it shows the last 500 posts, each post represented by a clickable color coded square (a color is equivalent to a post’s category). The most recent articles are on the top left, while the older are at the bottom right. When hovering on a square, title and first image of the post are displayed. It allows for a quick visual browse, a single click brings up the article. It is a rework based on the former interface of R-Echos which was using lines of colors.
This visualisation was inspired by a re-post a little while ago in Pierre’s reblog (about blogs); the original post coming from Social Fictions, whose ideas was much more about the software way of processing with a limited amount of memory, mimicking palimpsest: a manuscript or piece of writing material on which the original writing has been effaced to make room for later writing but of which traces remain.
This blog/blogject is a Janus head, 2 faced web0.0 monster sharing a memory-system styled on a palimpsest. When the limited memory it has is filled to maximum capacity it needs to reorganise it to make space otherwise it can’t store any more new blog entries. In doing this it has to try not to forget the old ones, but this is not always done with much success as memories confabulated over time become increasingly unrecognisable. This making space is done by the blogject and its functioning is modelled on how our brains interleave our memories: by dreaming. The resulting dreams are what the blogject publishes online.
The relationship between blog (and someone using it) and the blog-ejects rendered from/within this input is symbiotic. The blogject only starts functioning when memory reached a tipping point (being full), the blog can continue to accept new entries for as long as the blogject succeeds in freeing space, to which again there is an upper limit.
As an experiment in writing by a selfless-self (adjacent to automatic writing and the cut-up) there are two angles to this system: the blogject’s output and the stuff stored in the blog as its increasingly looses its integrity, are both written by a non-self. The purpose or meaning of this writing is not in the writing itself but in the interpretation of it by the ones submitting writing to its memory. This property too it shares with dreams.
(…)
A blogject, not to be confused with a slog (a sensor log), is the bot rephrased in the language of the blogosphere. Unlike bots, software-based attempts at making computers speak with us in our own language, that only have to respond on user input, blogjects in theory are pro-active and possess their own threshold function to decide when to produce something. Obviously, systems possessing artificial consciousness are non-existent, and bots and blogjects cannot but interpret/generate input of which is the meaning is always relative to templates in its database not relative to the outside world as you would suspect a true AI would.
Each cube represents a segment of a colour-coded memory. Each black dot represents a free segment. While the palimpsest has free segments entries are added from left to right and from top to bottom. When filled, dreaming commences (and the blogject will eject-text) to make space. This results in chains sharing a segment and releasing one in the process. The neat crystalline order inside the memory that exists in the beginning will slowly become chaotic.
The ideas behind the BlogJect are really interesting; it would be interesting to see such behaviour enacted on the R-Echos project, like evasive or digressive memory – it would never give the correct answer, but an almost correct one, though creating a sort of dérive inside the archive of the magazine.
It is also quite exciting to consider web software and web design aiming at the apparition and growth of a certain kind of new intelligent entities limited in some ways – a form of software reification, somehow.