Knowledge Lost was an art installation hosted in UART’s Terra Hall building on South Broad St. in Philadelphia. Created and realized by me and John Bezark, it was a eulogy to all the information being deleted off of Wikipedia. I wrote a data scraping server in Node.js that reported the deleted content from changes off Wikipedia’s continuously updating recent changes list. This was then piped into MAX/MSP where we did the bulk of our design. My sound design consisted of taking the scraped deletions, having them voiced by a voice to text protocol, and then vocoded through a series of big emotive chord voicing. We also allowed users to create poems out of the deletions at a workstation (built by John) that was integrated into the installation. It would then print your poem on a receipt for you to keep, and we would snag a screen shot of the poem to be used in zines printed at our gallery closing. John did a wonderful writeup of the project here:
https://johnbezark.info/knowledgelost
From the Knowledge Lost promotional website which is no more:
“Knowledge Lost is a gallery installation running from Jan 22nd, 2019 through March, 22nd 2019. It is made up of dynamic digital projections and music that incorporate a real-time feed of all the deletions happening on Wikipedia. There are an average of 155,520 edits a day on Wikipedia, some portion of which are deletions. What would it be like to stand near the drain where those deletions circle in their last moments before they are gone? Knowledge Lost is a eulogy to those bits of knowledge leaving us behind. Devoid of their original context, it is one last chance for those things to be known. And also a chance to know them as things not to know.”