What does the Æolian Interface Project represent if we consider it in the terms of contemporary digital aesthetics? The first distinction that can be made is between form and content. In this posthumanist age of the content-provider we are accustomed to speaking of data and information (ethereal, bodiless entites like sound and wind) as the "content" which can be poured into any container which avails itself. So, what is the content of the AIP?

Forgetting for the moment the aesthetic characteristics of the monolith as an architectural or sculptural installation we must step back and consider the essence of the Æolian tones. The answer, it quickly becomes clear, is that our interface disallows distinguishing between form and content. The form is the content. Our machine -- and indeed our authorial intentionality -- is not unbiased or transparent (though we would very much like to think that it is). The particular configuration that we have used to capture and generate sound is the form which gives rise to the format of the tones that we here. Granted, the physical agent of the tones is wind, but our "container," the form of the machine, is almost wholly responsible for the content of the sonifed wind data.

This is neither to claim that the machine has some self-motivating aesthetic urge nor that a natural aesthetic can be modified beyond recognition. Our point is that we understand the heavy mediation we have introduced into this transaction. Unlike the Romantics of the 18th and 19th centuries we do not view inspiration (or in this case data input) as an unmediated afflatus which animates the dead artist/machine. It is somewhat disturbing though necessary to recall Heidegger at this point. The essence of modern technology, he states, is the conversion of the natural world into a reserve of resources, an ever-standing landscape of potentiality. This is precisely how nature is configured in the scheme of the AIP. The flux of the natural world can be thought of as a standing reserve of data which exists to be translated by our machine. While the Marxist connotations of Heidegger's idea do not seem particularly pertinent here (it is obvious that there was no capital involved in the construction of the AIP!), we do think that our interface embodies an idea that is ubiquitous today: the entirety of the world exists to be converted, entered as data, simulated. Reality is the standing reserve for virtuality.

However, above we said that the form of the machine is almost wholly responsible for the content of the sonic data. There is something else, we believe.