Art helps us to understand the world we live in. We can in fact think of art as metadata about the world (and artists as metadata experts of the human condition). Art is also ahead in showing us the path to the future, and digital art may provide some clues to the future in the content management world.

At the NAB show, futurist Marina Gorbis talked about the seismic shifts taking place in the world of content creation and used examples of installation art pieces to illustrate trends like algorithmic content and non-human content creation.

Exhibit 1 is what I call "real-time fashion". In 1998, artist Nancy Paterson created a stock market skirt . Economists say there is a relationship between the stock market and fashion fluctuations. If the market is doing well, the skirt length reduces and if the markets are floundering, the length increases. The installation art consists of the mannequin Judy, a computer, several display monitors, and a mechanical system of motors, cables and pulleys. Some Perl scripts analyzed online stock quotes, and the skirt length adjusted accordingly.

"Painting the town LED" is Exhibit 2. In Erik Krikortz's art project Emotional Cities, the aggregated responses to "How are you feeling today" are used to light up a city's skyscrapers and serve to illumine the city's zeitgeist. You'll recognize the more prosaic version of this as "sentiment analysis" which is increasingly being added to marketers' tool kit.

Not mentioned by Gorbis but Exhibit 3 is "Writing on the wall". The Think Exhibition at New York's Lincoln Center to commemorate IBM's centenary consisted of a 123 feet long data visualization wall, which displayed dynamic patterns based on data feeds from the city's traffic, pollution, and sunshine indicators. The art on display was not a Da Vinci, but perhaps a Fibonacci.

Conventional notions of what constitutes art get challenged in these explorations. Similarly in an age of convergence, boundaries blur and traditional categorizations like platforms and channels can crumble.

Metadata so far has been operating in a linear, unidimensional fashion and has been helping make only basic connections and discovery for us. Are our information models, sense-making apparatus, and systems (and yes, even our own evaluations) ready for this brave beautiful world of multi-dimensional interconnectedness? What do we need to get ready?

Welcome your comments below...