World Time Mosaic

I did the technical realisation for my colleague Julia Staudach's: World Time Mosaic
A live net art installation, which was exhibited at: Essence 2009

Concept:

World Time Mosaic is feeded by webcam pictures from different world regions. Due to the different daylight situation at 10:30 CET, Julia Staudach's birth time, she had dark mosaics(night) and brighter mosaics (day) available, which she arranged to shape an eye. Over the course of the day the composition decays and recombines about 24h later, and it also changes throughout the year.

Technical realisation:

The network program, written in PHP, permanently scrapes webcam pictures according to a CVS spreadsheet, saves them with their ID plus a GMT based unix timestamp in the filename to disk, and then notifies the drawing program about the new picture via TCP socket.

The drawing program, written in Processing, receives the notifications about new pics, draws them to screen (live mode), and here and then jumps back into the time memory (time lapse mode).