“A Social Networks Visualisation at Ars Electronica” by W. Bradford Paley and Jefferson Y. Han.

I was one of the happy few (1000) who received this gorgeous piece of jewellery. The stick-pin uses IRDA to remember every other pin it “sees” all along the 5-day festival, but also when you met the person wearing it, and exactly how long you spent with them.

Privacy is ensured by the fact that you can turn it on whenever you want, and its numerical identity has no tie to personal identity.

The pins download all the enconters it has collected when you come to a specific spot within the Bruckernhaus Linz building. The data gathered from the pins is combined to a node/link diagram design to show the complexity of the relashionships among the festival attendees and to expose the inherent beauty in this trace of the social tapestry people weave as we meet, introduce, chat, etc.

See Trace Encounters.