Festival de la Imagen - ISEA2017

Pervasive technologies in socio-technical domains such as smart cities and smart grids question the values required for designing sustainable and participatory digital societies. Privacy-preservation, scalability, fairness, autonomy, and social-welfare are vital for democratic sharing economies and usually require computing systems designed to operate in a decentralized fashion. This paper examines sonification as the means for the general public to conceive decentralized systems that are too complex or non-intuitive for the mainstream thinking and general perception in society. We sonify two complex datasets that are generated by a prototyped decentralized system of computational intelligence operating with real-world data. The applied sonification methodologies are largely ad-hoc and address a series of concerns that are of both artistic and scientific merit. We create informative, effective and aesthetically meaningful soundworks as the means to probe and speculate complex, even unknown or unidentified, content. In this particular case, the sonification represents the constitutional narrative of two complex application scenarios of decentralized systems towards their equilibria.