Visualization of several wiki pages related to associated colorspaces defined by semantic terms and automatically produced by software agents.
Therefore, it’s pure fun to consider wikis and weblogs as aleatoric devices, as far as one can use them to rearrange every single encoded knowledge-snippet in any way possible. This mind shifting technology leads to completely different workflows concerning the acquisition and distribution of knowledge within any scientific or artistic domain, because knowledge working and artistic practice become composing.
The term aleatoric was introduced in 1954 by Werner Meyer-Eppler. He borrows the idea from “Théorie des fonctions aléatoires” of André Blanc-Lapierre and Robert Fortet. Meyer-Eppler defines processes within an acoustical context as aleatorical as far as the overall course is predefined, although in detail everything stays related to accident. So, aleatoric is less about pure accident than about small, controlled aberrations within the flow of things.
In musical terms, this is equivalent to the uniqueness of every single interpretation of a composition. No musician will play an aleatoric compsition the same twice. Constant innovation and expressiveness is a logical consequence of this technique.
The associative structure of knowledge within wikis makes it especially appropriate to browse the content according to aleatorical principles. In an analogous manner we just have to slightly change the sequence in which we navigate wiki-pages to change the meaning of the retrieved context.
This way aleatoric becomes a cognitive style, which describes a best practice wiki usage; quite amazing indeed! One doesn’t focus exclusively on one specific info page anymore, instead meaning becomes a byproduct of the arrangement and sequencing of several knowledge-snips. The interrelation of messages as deliberate ascription of meaning turns working with the semantic web into a creative game as an universal epistemological approach to science and art and a perfect way to deal with complexity.
Therefore, a wiki of a very different kind is going to be presented as part of the lecture. A wiki to be regarded as a society of interacting snippets of code, of software agents producing autonomously associated text and images describing a digital driven world.
University professor Thomas Fürstner, born 1964, lives and works in Vienna and Berlin. Economics degree from the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration, professorship at the Institute of Media Art and Fine Arts at the Vienna University of Applied Arts, Visiting Professor at the Danube University Krems. Actually working as innovation-designer leading the research and development department of bwin, an online gambling company. His research is mainly focused on sportsbetting as a new from of financial instrument related to prediction markets.
