TonyP (who looks a HELLUVALOT like Chief Anderson from Battle of the Planets), after we had a cup of tea and a natter in the BBC canteen, where I mentioned some of Raffi Krikorian‘s stuff knocked up a little bit of code that takes the current weather in London from a public site, and converts it into a background colour for his homepage.
The poetic bit, for me at least, is that little squares of the colour/temp. start building up at the bottom of the page over time.
Cue another natter between Tony, Me, Gid, Caroline and a few others who are looking at the design of the BBC Homepage, about layering information, especially rich, pattern-based “second-order” stuff, beneath or around a very simple, usable page design.
New users, or those in a task-hungry hurry are not impeded from use, and those with subtler or less-directed needs get satisfied by the nuances that build up and reveal themselves over time as a very individual, collective or complex/adaptive infotapestry is built up.
Petafloptimism 
At first glance, I think the key point relating Marclay’s piece (the artwork described at the Kottke link) and potential infotapestry is memory – Marclay says “even if you’re not a film buff, there’s familiarity to these images … This involves the viewer in ways that you can’t with new material.”
I’ve posted some very rough thoughts on this here … What we have to avoid is having ‘our’ layers assume the status of banner-ads (which are often abstract, nuanced info-layers themselves, just often the wrong ones from the user’s p-o-v) – perhaps this means truly interrogating how we can harness collective memory (as well relevance) or build layer-based mini-narratives (conjuring memory) over time.
Oh, here’s the link to more rough thoughts:
http://www.cityofsound.com/blog/archives/000176.html
(always forget that)
d.