Preparing for AND
This time next week I will unleash my software soothsayer upon Liverpool for Abandon Normal Devices. You can see my project listed on their website here, though truth be told I am less than enthused about the license they took with the project description. You can read my original blurb below.
How do we make sense of patterns and how do patterns make sense of us?
The power of patterns inspires belief; through the millennia their predictive power has held sway over both political and quotidian decisions. Data Mining Divination explores our belief in patterns and their place in digital existence.
Visitors will be invited to partake in an act of divination with a computer as their guide. In so doing they will contribute to the CASToly Research Project , an initiative which seeks to determine whether databases can learn to infer our futures better than the soothsayers of yore.
Participants who consent to their data being aggregated will receive a unique fortune provided by the computer. In return the user submits their experience to the database
This is an on-going research project where each fortune told gathers data which will be later aggregated and data mined to gain greater computational insight into these introspective practices. The computer will harvest data according to its programmed prerogative but can these pre-established categories encapsulate the transfer that occurs between outer worlds and your introspective processes?
I feel indebted to Sugru, whose wonderful hack resin has made assembling the physical elements of my project really straightforward, and the London Hackspace which has been an excellent place to construct the project!
Your original description describes my experience much better than my expectations on the day.
It’s probably worth noting that my tea leaves last week showed F, Fox and Cannon.
Almost certainly, in retrospect
, a 100% accurate prediction of the Liam Fox MOD scandal! I think I got Adam Werritty’s fortune instead of mine!
I am a data miner with 16 years experience. Although I have never worked with image recognition. I would love to hear about your progress.