mark inscriber is a data sculpture/sonification project. A horizontal bar supports a carriage with a firing chisel blade. The lateral movement is controlled by a stepper motor and chain system. The carriage advances a little at a time while the chisel blade cuts deep incisions into the wall.

background
vertical mark making is the earliest know form of recorded counting. As systems of counting developed in complexity, new methods of grouping marks were found. mark inscriber explores the relationship between these groupings and modern programming and mathematics by hammering numbers counted in different bases into the wall, performing an act of counting with no object.

1280 * 1024 takes advantange of the high definition of modern displays to show very high volumes of information simultaneously. A wikipedia file dump of huge amounts of crowd sourced information forms the basis of this piece. This data begins to take over the monitor pixel by pixel, populating its spaces with single dimensions of information transmitted with flashing light in morse code. The data builds until the full resolution of 1310720 points is achieved.

The space of the display can be conceived as just that: space. It has finite dimensions in width and height but also in depth with each pixel being capable of a defined number of individual colours. At this point the relationship between software and hardware becomes blurred as that number of colours is related to the computers ability to control those hues. This demonstrates that our culture and machine systems are inseparable and often confused. To work with one you must engage with the other and it is this relationship, the relationship between culture and machine that is explored with this work.

1280 * 1024 is the winner of the Sunderland Art Prize, jointly with Edwin Li

Burj Babil from tom schofield on Vimeo.

Burj Babil is video installation showing the destruction of a fictionalised Tower of Babel. It was made in processing and 3D Studio Max.

The direct indexical relationship between text and material is not only structurally embedded in the computer systems which manage, facilitate and entertain us, but rests in a history of science, belief, law and magic. While text is compiled in machine code, enacting the processes which turn on our street lights, render our videos and send data packets to the server, older societies performed other enactments of text, containing their own syntax and lexis. Religion, sorcerers, alchemists, writers of constitutions brought forth, with hubristic self-certainty, the world as we know it; spells, gold and human rights in that order. Burj Babil (Tower of Babel) is a video installation work. To create the tower, the source code file has been subjected to a number of transformation processes which corrupt and destroy the tower in different phases. The processes transform the vertex and face coordinates from the source code file into ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange 2) characters. The results are then fed into the google translate api. Most of the file is ignored since the sequence of characters do not correspond to real words. However when chance causes the ASCII sequence to form a recognizable word this will cause a corresponding physical translation of that vertex point. The resultant corrupted code is then used to re-make the model causing its eventual collapse. The final result of this process is a number of video sequences showing the destruction of the tower as its source code file is translated into different languages.

null by morse from tom schofield on Vimeo.

Overview
A series of messages are send using an antique morse signalling lamp. The messages refer to the inter-related histories of morse code, disaster and war and include the final transmissions of the titanic and the first ever message publicly sent via morse' "what hath God wrought?". The messages can be decoded via an android app and are also displayed on a projection in the exhibition space. After the performance the signal lamp is left in place and participants are able to send their own messages.

sticking point is a data visualisation project built in php and openframeworks and comes in two parts.

The larger print of the two prints draws on constitutional documents which include not only constitutions themselves but such documents as revolutionary manifestos, bills of rights, peace treaties etc. The Office For the High Commission of Human Rights at the United Nations defines a number of key themes or areas of human rights which are delineated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights - a document conceived shortly after the Second World War. In the print, the context of those words is traced through history through around two hundred documents in English translation.

Participants use a sliding library ladder to view the higher parts of the print

Each year has a colour code so it is possible to trace follow the references to different themes in the same year through different documents. The curves join together documents from the same country.

The smaller print is a visualisation of distinct words in the sections of 75 world constitutions which pertain to fundamental rights, freedoms duties and obligations of citizens.

Each circle represents a single country. The words are arranged around a circle and are in order of significance. This significance is judged by how often each word occurs in this country's constitution in comparison to other countries' constitutions. The lines and circles together form a graph of that significance. Finally the curves link together words which appear in more than one constitution.