[Megan] Yesterday I attended the GEL conference, sponsored by Creative Good, a small consulting firm that specialises in customer experience. I highly recommend the conference (registration for next year is starting now!), but it's very difficult to explain. Basically, it's just a series of presenters who deliver ... an experience. Almost every one was brilliant, and there were no bad ones. Seriously, sign up. Just about everyone who's ever attended the thing agrees that it's an amazing, amazing day.
This guy, for instance, makes screensavers. Okay, yawn. No, actually, it's fascinating. The things he programs rely on a few simple rules to create amazingly complicated emergent patterns. It's fractals in action. The neatest thing he showed us was his new project, the Whitney Music Box, which combines Fibonacci sequences with harmonics. Each of the objects on the screen has its own tone, which goes off as it crosses a horizontal line. The result is emergent audio, as well as visual, patterns. At the end, he grouped us by birthdays, assigned us each a screen object, and had us make the sound as it crossed the line, which sounds dorky, in a hippie summer-camp kind of way, but in fact was really, really neat. Check out the site. It's a great way to waste a Saturday morning.