Don Havey

Let me begin with the theme of this blog:

Sustainably harvested information.

I’m interested in the idea of conserving bits. I’m not sure exactly why, but I have a feeling that it stems from my opinion that physical matter and information are nearly one and the same. Therefore, an extension of general (physical) conservation and efficiency would be the conservation of information. The smallest unit of information is the bit.

The early stages of the internet promoted the efficient, sustainable use of information due to the extremely low bandwidths available at the time. Content was succinct. Every bit mattered.

As connection speeds increased, however, so did the spread of redundant, unnecessary information. Examples: mash-ups, mash-ups, mash-ups, via trees, domain parking, hack writing, fluff, spin-offs. There is a theme here. The incredible number of internet users supports redundancy. And to some extent, redundancy is necessary. Imagine every person who ever viewed the Dancing Baby video (remember that?) loading it from the same server. The more adaptive model that has evolved is this: once a particular destination (page, article, media object) reaches a critical number of hits, other sites naturally want to share the traffic; this process repeats until the trend fades.

Some types of redundancy are necessary strictly for structural reasons, like in a power grid. Other types of redundancy improve the original source by appending information or displaying it in a unique context, like in a curated gallery. But some types of redundancy detract from the original source – as in the parasitic examples above – and eventually dissuade that type of source from being generated. The goal of this blog, which will feature my work, thoughts, and tutorials, is to provide only the sustainable type of information.

I’m interested in the fields of interactive media arts, design, architecture, and to some extent, web design and development. The tutorials on this site will mostly revolve around my work in Processing, because it is the least documented of all the languages I program in, and is an easy and addictive way to get interested in electronic art.

Coming soon: Processing introduction, Primary classes, Voronoi diagrams, Icosahedral globe, The Game of Life, Trees made of letters…

Until then!