Baby photos

This is a visualisation of my blog according to the relative numbers of links, images, tables and other syntactical aspects. For specifics about what each node colour connotes go here. Of course it's completely useless yet I find it strangely pleasurable to look at.

Watching it grow and sprout organically made me feel rather paternal towards my blog for the first time? Perhaps it's the seeming fragility of the links between the nodes that made me feel like this. Until just now I've only ever thought of my blog as an entirely abstract thing, a program running within the context of a bigger open source application. I think this picture makes it seem distinct, cut-off, and somehow microscopic. It's like peering at pollen or microbes through an electron microscope.

Anyway it made me think about how the lens of art often helps us to re-visualise and reinterpret something we've thought of as understood or at the very least familiar. It also makes me think about human value ascription; how and at what point bonds of emotional attachment to non-sentient entities can and are legitimately formed. For example anyone who has ever lost a mobile phone or had a hard drive die on them will know the momentarily heart stopping agony that accompanies it....it's something more than simple inconvenience I believe there's also a pain associated with the loss of a source of emotional dependence.

A cautionary tale of what can happen if we let our emotional dependence upon technology or in this case computers get the better of us.

Please excuse the moronic and appallingly xenophobic introduction to this video...