I headed out into the rain on Monday night to watch the Vancouver / San Jose game at my local. While the game was a write-off, I the conversation certainly made leaving the house seem worthwhile. I ran into my friend and colleague Simon Levin, who was having a drink with Urbana-Champagne based artist Kevin Hamilton. Just in case the geek-quotient wasn't high enough, we were later joined by technologist and open-source hardware evangelist Danial Jollife. In lieu of a transcript of our heated conversation, here are a few links that resulted.

First, Kevin tipped me off to the work of Marc Downie, which I had somehow managed to remain unaware of. The image above is from Downie's project Enlightenment, in which software attempts to digitally reconstruct Mozart's most difficult musical structure (the coda to the "Jupiter Symphony"). Commissioned by the Lincoln Center, the installation is presented on a set of ten screens, one for each instrument in the electronic orchestra. According to the site, Enlightenment is the highest-resolution live digital artwork ever created (though Schiffman may have something to say about that).

Ben Rubin's San Jose Semaphore projects seems about as perfect as a digital installation can get. It's simple - consisting of four screw-head shapes projected from the top of  Adobe's headquarters that rotate and generate sound. It's beautiful - the shapes are almost hypnotic as they turn slowly to create patterns. And, it's certainly clever: it took the winning team more than a year to determine that the installation was broadcasting the text of Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. I spent most of an afternoon perusing Rubin's website, and his large body of work (most notably perhaps on the 2004 Prix Ars Electronica-winning Listening Post).