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04.01.03 StreamingMedia, electronic art with IP and water.
StreamingMedia is defined by its author Jonah Brucker-Cohen as an 'interactive data sculpture' which implements the H2O/IP protocol, that is, the transmission of informations between two computers by means of water. The innovative installation consists of two computer put at different heights, one of which captures an image and sends it to the other using a code made of water drops. The project aims to demonstrate how digital informations can be encoded and decoded using organic forms, so as to create a physical network between different devices. The characteristics of the single data packet are much more than the usual, and they include: fluidity, heat, properties of the three states of the matter (solid, liquid, gaseous), varying density according to state and surface tension. The system conforms to the OSI (Open Systems Interconnection) standards for the physical, network, transport and application layers. If the mix of organic and digital is always fascinating, since it allows to regain familiarity with the machine and rationalizes the natural according to binary parameters, this work liquefies the data packets giving them back the physicalness they lacked. The data become therefore visible, and their abstraction becomes material through, paradoxically, the oldest medium for transporting informations: water.