Uses a weather visualisation of hurricane Katrina to reformat conversations culled from Internet newsgroups.

CYCLONE.SOC is an installation of a network visualization that uses as its source material conversations and topics culled from USENET newsgroup postings.

In CYCLONE.SOC newsgroup topics are downloaded to a local machine and re-presented or formatted as a series of spiralling, textual 'isobars' that trace complex patterns across the surface of a navigable virtual space. This textual churning may then either be browsed and mined by a user (in a quasi-functional manner as a newsgroup reader) or experienced as an ambient visualization of newsgroup conversations (i.e. can either be installed as an interactive work, or a self-running visualization).

To represent this process CYCLONE.SOC employs an organizational model derived from scientific visualizations of weather conditions to metaphorically connote the conversational churn, eddies and tumult of online newsgroup interactions. In staging these interactions as a process of meteorological precipitation, newsgroup conversations 'condense' in the work's environment as a temporal, ambient patterning.