Date: August 13, 2011 6:56:17 AM EDT
Hi Michal, Hi Morgan,
This is all great -- can't wait ti see the data come trickling into Ozone soon! But let's design for a world in which we have dense set of sensors, where dense means approximately continuous in space, time, as well as data-space. Practically speaking, this means on the order of video density, i.e. tens of millions of channels per unit time. In the face of such density, it makes sense to use a minimax design tactic: minimum bandwidth needed to maximally intercalate vegetal / soil activity with social activity.
Another design tactic I would us to try in most of our sensor work is to use a push model instead of regular polling (a pull model). This means I'd like the sensor to emit data when there is a change above a delta. Ideally that delta should be tunable by an application programmer. This means the sensor data should arrive from the analog world with irregular intervals of time. (Thanks to Joel Ryan and his work with gestural musical sensing.)
Tim and Flower's timelapse data show us that our fastest growing plants -- the morning glories -- had a "frequency" of about one macroscopic (human legible) cycle of creeper per hour. (Ask Natasha Myers @ York for a technical term :) I don't know what the frequency should be, but I would like to work with the lowest possible frequency that we can.
The research challenge is in fact : How can we intercalate the slow rhythms of sidereal and vegetal activity (hour) with human rhythms (second) in a way that is legible to us?
This goes to the heart of the fact most "environmental" sensor art is boring or has the same affect as noise. Rather than fetishize the boring or noise as aesthetics, let's see what we can do with streams of sparse, irregular sensor data.
Xin Wei