While reading Art in the Age of Digital Distribution by Mark Tribe and Reena Jana, I found out about many interesting new media artists that emerged around the beginnings of the internet. One such artist is John Klima, who created “ecosystm”, a real-time 3D environmental simulation which allows users to explore a virtual world filled with animals and plants which represent real time currencies, market indices and weather reports from around the world. Observing flocks of birds which represent currency or trees that gain or lose branches based on a market indices is a drastically different way of visualizing such data as opposed to the traditional use of Wall Street stock boards. Such a visualization reminds us of the organic attributes of the flow of wealth. 

Another new media artwork which I found interesting was “Free Radio Linux”, a piece of art created by Honor Harger and Adam Hyde. Free Radio Linux was an audio distribution of the Linux kernal, the code which handles low level operating system procedures for the Linux/GNU operating system. With over 4 million lines of code, the whole sound transmission took nearly 600 days to complete, running 24 hours a day. While far out of the realm of possibility for a human to accomplish, a program written for this purpose could easily endure such a long and tedious task as this. The choice of transmitting the Linux kernal is an interesting one, as this is software which, while open source, not many people think about while using a Linux machine. I find the artwork quite ironic; the developers of Linux wrote this code for a machine they assumed to be a passive listener and now that same machine is speaking the code back to them.