seed_1216976400
The World Wide Web is an open environment capable of distributing information in a decentralized manner, allowing participation and the constant transformation of its content. Lev Manovich compared information or media objects to a train and each receiver to a train station: Information arrives, gets remixed with other information, and then the new package travels to other destinations where the process is repeated.

As a first experiment for DIY GORI a 'seed' was prepared for distribution throughout the Internet. -The term 'Gori' means open hook in Korean and is often used to refer to the 'fastening' and 'loosening' of human relationships- The seed to be planted in cyberspace is a blueprint for GORI, a new media plant of physical computing, growing up or dying fed by network data, connected to the Internet by USB. The blueprint is printed on a wiki site to introduce the project development process and technical details to the net-public / the self-evolving environment for free distribution that any net-citizen can browse and design on their own.

At ISEA 2008, a selected version of the blueprint is presented as an installation where its wiki contents are printed and exhibited on a more traditional medium. Seed_1216976400 is the name of the installation and the 10 digits '1216976400' indicate one specific point in time of wiki history, as a still frame of the seed evolution. It is in fact the converted Unix time stamp of 2008-07-25 00:00:00 GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) which is the first day of ISEA 2008.
DIY GORI
Few people would doubt that the Internet is an integral part of our life now through which a new cultural environment was created - alongside our natural and built environment. The late Austrian artist/architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser (who was famous for his ideas on human reconciliation with nature) often insisted that people should be more creative and responsible about their living environment, saying that "If man walks in nature's midst, then he is nature's guest and must learn to behave as a well-brought-up guest." DIY GORI questions our manners as "guests" of the internet and what roles we could play while living in this online environment.

DIY GORI focuses on the very nature of the Internet as 'Open Source Culture', the creative practice of appropriation and free sharing of found and created contents; and it experiments with the idea that objects exist as evolving pieces of digital data in cyberspace where they are continually remixed by users.

Jee H Oh
For questions, please email to jee(at)diygori.net
jee.diygori.net
<< seed_1216976400 at National Museum of Singapore

      - view video (.mov 800KB)
      - more images
Introduced @
2008-07-31 Asian artists connect the dots between virtual and real, International Herald Tribune
2008-07-29 ISEA 2008 - The Juried exhibition, www.we-make-money-not-art.com
2008-07-25 It's art, for the Facebook generation, Reuters

Exhibition
2008-07-25 ~ 2008-08-03
DIY GORI: seed_1216976400
National Museum of Singapore, ISEA2008

Seminar/Talk
2008-06-30 Physical Network Visualization
National University of Singapore

2008-06-25 @Republic Polytechnic, Singapore
This work is licenced
under a Creative Commons Licence: Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
DIY GORI would like to thank...

Arts Council Korea, Fred Lee, Mirae Seo, MIRAGE@KAIST, National University of Singapore and ISEA2008.

Free Web Counters