eBay Landscape by Carlo Zanni Produced by o2

Mountains are generated grabbing eBay.com stock markets charts. Charts are cut away from all those elements describing the status of the market, like grids, numbers and other signs (please look at the image beside). In the end the online script cuts away everything but the blue shape that I use as background for my work, for the mountains.

In foreground you can see some bamboo trees and other plants. They are cut from the first image you find in the CNN.com home page. This image has been cut following the shape of a pre-programmed black drawing. In truth we designed a tool, allowing us to transform a drawing in a mask using it online to cut images taken live from Internet.

While the shape of the mountains changes every day (when the NASDAQ closes), the content, the form of the bamboos changes as many times as CNN.com updates its website (with breaking news and so on, so our social behaviours generates the content of the trees).

Here you can watch the archives with stored landscapes and CNN homepage images.

Then there is the sky, that is a fade effect looping some colors generated from the IP numbers of the connected user (an IP is a code formed by four numbers identifying the internet connection of a computer).
The script takes the last 3 numbers of each IP to generate a color following the RGB (red-green-blue) scheme and in cycles them, changing colors each time a user joins or leaves the network.

Finally the stars: each of them represents a connected user. There is a counter reloading very often so that it can displays users in real time.

"e-bay landscape" is an online environment based on concepts such as -contemporary identity- (IP presence) and -data lanscape- (ebay stock quote) that, even if invisible, they radically influence our daily life.