Invisible Commitment – Oli Laurelle

Invisible Commitment – Oli Laurelle

Invisible Commitment is a print project by Oli Laurelle that sets about visualising SVN logs (as well as Pure Data and SuperCollider source code) by representing various attributes and parameters with tree-like and branching structures. SVN, also known as Subversion, is a version-control system allowing developers to maintain current and historical versions of files – typically development source code.

Oli uses recursive algorithms to parse his data into Processing. The typical branching structures are a common schematic arrived at from such divide and conquer methodologies where problems are solved by solving smaller and smaller instances.

The SVN folder structures generate the main branches of the tree, their thickness indicates the frequencies according to occurrences of individual developers accessing files. Branch length further denotes the number of sub-folders contained within each folder. Fruits at the end of each branch represent the type of file contained by accessing specific file type extensions.

The style of the final renders have something of the spatial qualities associated with Chinese scroll paintings, this aspect being accentuated by seal-like red blocks positioned at the bottom of each composition. These seals contain information regarding who was involved in the project – including the names of the developers and duration of time they were involved in each project.

This project uses open-source visualization software (Processing) to visualize the working of an open source application (SVN) and was presented at a festival of open-source and free software, the Make Art Festival, held in France in December 2009.