We can’t access the elements of the archive individually. Too many of them. We need intermediaries. People to tour us through. Tools, filters, sensors. That will listen, see, aggregate and separate, connect and disconnect, assemble and disassemble.
With the intermediaries, we will have to learn and speak the same language, accept the gaps, sense the priorities. The tools. They won’t see as we see through our eyes, they won’t listen as we listen, they will perceive through different dimensions, they will count time with another anxiety.
As our intermediaries, our tools will be our interlocutors.
We are not making an interface to the data.
Rather more like 100 interfaces to the data.
We call the entries “probes” the entries of this logbook… what is presented are the traces of these interrogations, the output of scripts, algorithms, personal reflections.
The page on the left shows the messages and the activity in our code repository created for the project. This way we document and we inform each other of how these different interfaces evolve and how we change them. The system we use (git, developed by another famous Finnish technologist) takes part to the conversation periodically commenting the moves of the file.