Exe0.2 Winnie Soon

The Spinning Wheel of Life (2016)

This work draws upon my previous working article from exe0.1- [At the time of execution: throbber.start()]

Screenshots:

Description:

The project challenges the perception of a throbber that is usually understood as a transitional object, waiting for content delivers on a screen. Forcing to focus on the spinning wheel with a networked music stream, the project asks: how might we engage with a throbber beyond the negative connotations of waitings, frustrations and annoyance in contemporary software culture?

Data is streamed through different speeds and sites across network connections, devices and nodes. The work reveals the microtemporality of streamed data that is not often made visible to us. Instead of presenting a throbber that spins at a constant speed, the project makes apparent the real-time network traffic at a microscopic level through the display of repetitive but different tempo of ellipses. This might enable us to conceive a stream of discontinuity.

Considering a stream produces differences and rhythms, the work takes the strategy of slowing down and minimising data size to capture the background processes of synchronisation, operations and executions. Buffering is a coupling of storage and transfer, and a buffer is a temporary memory in which writing and reading of data are processed at different rates. More precisely, the viewer is not watching or listening to the content as data arrives, instead, the viewer is experiencing the processed data that has arrived and stored in the buffer. There is latency between data arrival, data storage and data processing.

The Spinning Wheel of Life addresses multiple executions occur along a network journey. There are different rates, tempo, pulses, pauses and rhythms at multiple scales - from the operations of the CPU to network routers, from the transmissions of senders to receivers, from the writing to the reading of buffers, and from continuous streams to discontinuous packets. The Spinning Wheel of Life is a reflection on the microtemporal complexity of operative processing, constantly rendering the now in this pervasive and networked conditions of contemporary software culture.

[side note1]The title of the project is borrowed from a ‘wait cursor’ in the Macintosh Operating System X designed by Apple. The wait cursor is colloquially known as “The Spinning Wheel of Death”, referring to the malfunction or failure of a running program or a system that leads to screen freezes. The name takes on negative connotations as the problems are usually difficult to diagnose.

[side note2]The use of the word ‘life’ is referenced from a field in TCP specification: Time to Live (TTL), which limits the lifespan of data within a connection. Between a network transmission, the network made up of multiple ‘hops’. TTL is defined as the number of hops that a packet has to pass through before reaching its destination. This also means that if a packet passes through more than a defined number of hops, the packet is being discarded, meaning it will be time to die as opposed to live. Therefore, each packet has its own lifespan and its own state of life or death.

Video documentation (work in progress):

4 mins video [here]

Video stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXb3XXi9Xww&list=PLzjkiYUjXuevVG0fTOX4GCTzbU0ooHQ-O&index=12

Date: 18 Apr 2016, 15.30 - Aarhus, Denmark

Ideal setup and how it works:

Ideally, it is an installation work that displays the visual on screen and comes with a headphone. A dynamic throbber is visually presented (only a throbber but no youtube screen) and an audience will hear the youtube 8-bit video game music playlist, and both are run in real time.

How it works: A software is made in processing, constantly listening to a range of IP addresses in real-time. Each display of an ellipse is subjected to network packet arrival. A series of the ellipse will form a noticeable and animated icon - throbber.