Emerging technologies have made it possible for artists to use a wide range of live, external data sources to give their work relevance and impact. Works that use these live data sources share certain strategies, values, and influences. Not only does this type of art have much artistic potential, but it can help the Web by encouraging the development of machine-understandable, Semantic data formats. What kind of tools would give some coherence to real-time art and facilitate its creation?

Switchboard is an open-source conceptual level interface to a library of data mining tools and web services, including Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Del.icio.us, Flickr, and many more. It is written in Java and packaged for the Processing environment. It was created as part of Jeff Crouse’s masters thesis, as was Interactive Frank. With Interactive Frank, the user starts off by typing in a sentence, and then the generator takes over, scouring the web for sentences to hopefully construct a cohesive narrative. In addition, the program finds and plays a streaming audio station that fits the narrative.