This is a short demonstration of PacketGarden, a computer program I wrote a couple of years ago. It was commissioned by Arnolfini Gallery, in Bristol, U.K.

PacketGarden generates a graph in the form of a garden world, each day, from network traffic captured on a computer. Uploads make mountains and downloads make valleys. Different plants will grow where the activity occurs, the 'species' of which relates to what internet service you were using (web pages, P2P, games, email and IM).

PacketGarden was written in Python (using the Python Soya library in particular) on a Debian GNU/Linux system. It was later ported to Windows XP and OS X (PPC).

More information, source-code and downloads are available here:

julianoliver.com/pg

P.S I'd greatly appreciate help from someone porting it to OS X Intel and Windows Vista as I get many requests for each!

P.P.S This video was captured on Ubuntu 8.10 using the super desktop video capture software, glc. As usual, any desktop capture software doesn't represent the true frame-rate of the software in use (ie it's faster than the video shows).