Shaping Forms on The Web with a Collective Memory

The paper describes a web-based artwork that uses movement detected by the cameras in each computer that views it to influence its development in terms of colours, timings and shapes. It develops according to a collective history of user behaviour. The Shaping Form series are the latest works arising from Ernest Edmond's preoccupation with interaction and time. These works have previously been made and exhibited as individual wall hanging pieces. A new version has been developed that woks across the WWW and in which the shared experiences at all of the client locations that access it combine to form a distributed network that, in total, influences the shaping form development. Shaping Form on the Web takes a server-client form. The client web application is a Flash application that computes activity levels according to camera inputs and posts the activity levels to Java servlets. A collective history partly determines the behaviour and development of the work as seen at each client. The paper describes the design and development of the software system that is, in essence, the artwork. The work demonstrates a new view of distributed interactive software systems, particularly from the point of view of the interactive experience. We argue that this work provides a new approach to understanding the human-computer systems implications of the Swarm Intelligence approach.