The Operating Systems Project is an open infrastructure for ‘harvesting’ and visualising/sonifying data to support collaborative interdisciplinary projects in environmental, social and cultural contexts. Managed by i-DAT the Operating Systems Project is concerned with making ‘data’ generated by human, ecological, economic and societal activity tangible and affective.

Like a matryoshka doll these Operating Systems recursively collapse in on themselves: Bio-OS.org {the body simultaneously an individual and a crowd} / Arch-OS.org {software for buildings} / S-OS.org {where happiness lies somewhere at the end of a bell curve} / Eco-OS.org {bringing the landscape a little closer}.

Idly, he wondered what these geometric forms really represented – he knew that only a few seconds earlier they had constituted an immediately familiar part of his everyday existence – but however he rearranged them spatially in his mind, or sought their associations, they still remained a random assembly of geometric forms.

Ballard, JG