Pachube

Pachube is a web service available at that enables you to connect, tag and share real time sensor data from objects, devices, buildings and environments around the world. The key aim is to facilitate interaction between remote environments, both physical and virtual. Apart from enabling direct connections between any two environments, it can also be used to facilitate many-to-many connections: just like a physical "patch bay" (or telephone switchboard) Pachube enables any participating project to "plug-in" to any other participating project in real time so that, for example, buildings, interactive installations or blogs can "talk" and "respond" to each other. Pachube is a little like YouTube, except that, rather than sharing videos, Pachube enables people to monitor and share real time environmental data from sensors that are connected to the internet.

Pachube acts between environments, able both to capture input data (from remote sensors) and serve output data (to remote actuators). Connections can be made between any two environments, facilitating even spontaneous or previously unplanned connections.

Apart from being used in physical environments, it also enables people to embed this data in web-pages, in effect to "blog" sensor data.

What both Biomapping and Pachube have in common is that they a) reformulate what is data on their own terms, b) re organize the formal and informal relationships between governments, corporations and citizens, c) they have a thorough philosophical grounding in a history of hybrid artistic practices.

These applications can become services offered by the networked capability of large numbers of individual users, and in doing this – in the very act of doing this – we are reminded of Rebecca Empson writing: "... the doing involved in making things visible or invisible makes relations”.

It is important to realize that the doing makes relations. These relations are not disinterested exercises. They redefine what counts as data, what counts as input for systems that are not necessarily generated by formal institutions, or corporations that harvest patents and ip.

These new relations are not systems in the old sense of the word, more accurately they can be described as patches, and plug outs - not tapping into an existing infrastructure, but using that infrastructure to form new relations.