Predictions and MYPOCKET
A few weeks ago Burak Arikan has released his new project called MYPOCKET on turbulence. He described the project as:
MYPOCKET discloses the artist’s personal financial records to the world by exploring and revealing essential patterns in the daily transactions of his bank account. These are the records that we usually keep secret, whereas financial institutions intensively analyze them to score our credibility. Archived on the site, the artist’s two years of spending history is analyzed by the custom software to predict future spending; these predictions sometimes determine his future choices, creating a system in which both the software and the artist adapt to one another. Influenced by today’s techno-cultural milieu, MYPOCKET presents a hybrid interface to a living physical/digital process.
Other than the visualization of this huge amount of data, for me the most attractive part of the project is the prediction feed section. It is so obvious that, it’s not so easy to calculate the prediction of humans; however, in the feed we are able to see that the software is managing to make some succesfull predictions after a long time later. So my ultimate question at this point is if Burak runs this feed for 10 years will this prediction system increase its success rate or not? We have already figured out that AI is not going to work in the near future -at least in the way that we always imagined- so, at this point the main tendancy in the media/data art/science fields is more and more turning to this predictions and analyzation algorithms/computations. It is hard for me to answer the question yet, however, I must admit that I do not expect to see so much successfull predictions from computers. I guess, I am a person who still believes the magical irrationality and the tricks of human minds that makes our life much more complex and beautiful. I hope Burak runs and even updates the project for a long time, so I will get the answer of my question.
You may also find a very well written article about the project on dügümküme. Unfortunately it is only in turkish.
March 21st, 2008 at 18:09
Mahir thank you for posting about MYPOCKET. Today we all want to predict the future, we want to know the unknown. MYPOCKET is a critique for this condition.