Browse the web to create a work of art with Packet Garden

by Bob Crabtree on 17 January 2007, 16:07

That, more or less, is the idea behind Packet Garden, an app that gathers information about what you do online and uses it - solely for your amusement and pleasure - to "grow a private world you can later explore".

Packet Garden - available to download in beta versions for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux - takes note of all the servers you visit, their geographical location and the kinds of data you access.

Uploads result in the creation of hills and downloads form valleys - the position of each being dependent on the internet address visited.

And, seemingly, none of the info is made public or shared - it's all kept private on your PC.

Click for larger image

As you'll possibly now have figured, the height of the hills and depths of the valleys depends on the amount of data sent and received.

To add variety, the landscape also gets a growth of plants, different for different detected protocols - HTTP plants, peer-to-peer plants, games plants, email plants, FTP plants, whatever.

Packet Garden, we're told, was commissioned by the Arnolfini art centre in Bristol and created by Julian Oliver using open source software.

But what's the point of it all? Well, it's eye-candy and a bit of fun, it seems, and that's no bad thing, surely?

Or do you disagree? Share your thoughts with us in this thread in the HEXUS.community.