We Want Media

Beauty and chaos is a multi-user environment bridging the realms of cyber space and physical space, composing music and generating image within a fixed geographical location based on user data from around the world in real-time.

As if the Internet wasn't already full of addicting distractions from the every day, here's another old-but-new-to-me outlet for release: Beauty and Chaos. Here you'll find a screen, a counter of users and miscellaneous scribbles. Digital community art!

I've been using the Internet for around a decade, so it startled me at first to learn that Beauty and Chaos is six years old. (Am I just in a black hole here? Does everyone already know about it?)

But aside from the sheer coolness of collaborative drawing on my computer screen with anonymous strangers, options are limited. Most people resort to scribbles. It is difficult to draw with a mouse. I ended up writing (painfully) messages to people I knew who were also on the site. I wonder: What if we were holding pens to our screens? What makes the experience more heightened than blogging is the fact that time and space are condensed even tighter. But in this tight space, we lose our ability to communicate anymore.

If someone could just blend Beauty and Chaos with NYU's Multi-Touch Sensing through Frustrated Total Internal Reflection Display, then we'd have something magical.