Generator.x has been on extended (and unannounced) one-month holiday, but now summer is ending and blogging will slowly resume. To warm up, here are a few random links that have accumulated:

• AOL reSearch has just managed to release a substantial data set containing 20 million search queries from over 650 000 users. What was probably an eager attempt at scoring Open Source brownie points, has rapidly become a public relations disaster. Americans are rightly paranoid about their privacy, and the data set is likely to include personal data like names, social security numbers, unpleasant searches for porn and violent images etc.

  The original post has not surprisingly been removed from AOL, although a cached copy can be seen using Google's cache. Mirrors posting the data set can easily be found, one of the best bets is to try the Bittorrent download. While the release of these data is bad news, it’s sure to be of interest to information visualizers and dataminers. It would almost be surprising if no art works came out of this debacle.

  Read Techcrunch for a good overview of the whole story.

• Kunstverein Medienturm in Graz will feature a show called Further Processing in September. The show will show software-based works created with Processing, and also give a presentation of the tool itself. Contributing artists are Pablo Miranda Carranza, Fabio Franchino, Ben Fry, Golan Levin, Lia, Mark Napier, C.E.B. Reas, Karsten Schmidt, Martin Wattenberg, Marius Watz. The show is curated by Sandro Droschl (director of Medienturm and one of the curators behind Abstraction Now) and myself.
• Art.ficial Emotion 3.0 is an interesting exhibition at Itau Cultural in Sao Paulo, Brazil, featuring a major presentation of media artists whose works relate to cybernetic theory. See Paul Prudence's writeup on Dataisnature for a summary. Regine over at we-make-money-not-art recently did a interview with Guilherme Kujawski, one of the curators of the show. In it he presents his ideas about the exhibition and its relation to cybernetic theory.

  For visual impressions of the show, see the following Flickr sets : mrprudence, watz.

• Code & Form is a new blog I’ve started to cover more technical and code-related issues that would be too geeky for Generator.x. This separation of content means that Generator.x will be more clearly focused on finished works and theory, rather than tools and technology.
• Ars Electronica is around the corner, if anyone is going and would like to meet up please send me an email on marius at unlekker net. I had thought of organizing an official Generator.x gathering, but there are not enough hours in the day… Hope to see some of you there anyway!