Online art exhibition that archives error messages from users around the globe.

“esc for escape begun in 2000. It was part of <Content = No Cache>. By that time I invited people to submit error messages asking them: Have you ever read something scary on your screen? Do you understand why programmers suppose they are programming for programmers? Do you fear error messages? I collected these messages for one year. Nevertheless, new operating systems and new forms of connection, inspired me to redesign the project and to update it to Windows Xtra Problems, OS X bugs and to give it a different format (a teleintervention + a DVD documentary).” (from the project’s “Book of Errors” page.)

Starter Links: “esc for escape” | the artist’s home page

Transliteracies Research Report By Lisa Swanstrom

Summary:
“Tell us: What was the most scary, funniest, unforgettable error message of your life?” So asks Giselle Beiguelman’s “esc for escape,” (2004) a multifaceted art project that solicits and archives error messages from computer users around the globe and re-expresses them in a variety of contexts and media. The project includes a public exhibition of error messages on electronic billboards in São Paulo, Brazil; a repository of selected error messages published on the web, entitled “The Book of Errors”; “The Monastery,” an archive of all error messages related to the project; a dvd of the project; a project blog; as well as several “trailers,” which offer ironic visualizations of various error messages by the artist. (Can this sentence be broken up into 2?) In addition to providing a playful space for people to express their most “unforgettable” error messages, the project offers a subtle—yet sustained and sophisticated—commentary about the relationship between computer code and natural language in relation to the digital age. (more…)

Surname is a literary style that describes the celebrations in wedding, birth and circumcision ceremonies in Ottoman Palace. This book is a miniature manuscript based on one of these surnames. In the Surname (1582-1583) of Murat III, Nakkas (the painter) Osman built a documentary of the 55-day long festival organized for the honor of the Shehzadehs (Sultan’s sons.) Although the scene of the festival was represented in a fixed background, the parts of the “décor” were enriched by surprising variations with no particular aim to depict a real space. Therefore, the structural aspects of this manuscript reflect the characteristics of a subjective narration as opposed to a documentary that is claiming to be objective. However this is still not an individual subjectivity but a collective subjectivity that represents the visual attitude formed by the visual culture of the era.

In this project, cinematography was used as a tool of navigation within the miniature environment. The whole scene was divided into layers considering the iconographic narration of the miniatures. A virtual camera travels within the 3D layered space, occasionally focusing on the sub narratives of the celebration. In these sub narratives, a user/viewer can examine the points of view of figures through cinematic visual grammar.

Surname movie (20MB-~ 5-15mins download time)

Conceptual art piece that proposes to network final resting places with online content.

“Cemetery 2.0, by Elliott Malkin, is a concept for networked devices that connect burial sites to online memorials for the deceased. The prototype links the gravestone of Hyman Victor, Malkin’s great-grandfather, to his surviving Internet presence…The Cemetery 2.0 device maintains a live satellite Internet connection. Visitors to the physical memorial can view related memorials on the device display, while visitors of any of the online memorials will recognize that their browsing is associated directly with the actual burial site.” (From We Make Money Not Art)

Starter Links: Review from We Make Money Not Art | Project Description from the Artist’s Web Site

“Kitab-al Hiyal (The Book of Ingenious Mechanical Devices) documents the mechanical description of various hydraulic machines, written in 1206 by Al Jazari, an irrigation engineer who was employed in the palace of the Artuklu Sultanate in today’s south-eastern Turkey. The book contains approximately 300 automated devices including their construction and usage information – all illustrated with technical drawings in the style of miniature painting.
One of the most important aspects of this book is its visualization techniques such as showing the important parts of mechanisms separately in a bigger scale, constructing mechanisms step-by-step from parts to whole, and cross sectioning for depicting inner layers. Another characteristic of this manuscript as an interface archetype is the attention given not only to the explained mechanisms with their functional structure but also to the outer layer that creates and enhances the illusion of artificial life. The fairytale figures on the outermost layers of the mechanisms further serves the purpose of entertaining the guests of Artuklu Palace.”

Starter Links: Water Pouring Automaton | Elephant Clock

Online tool by Brian L. Pytlik Zillig.

“TokenX: a text visualization, analysis, and play tool” (from the project web site), is an online interface based out of the University of Nebraska’s Center for Digital Research in the Humanities that allows the user to view web page components or file components in alternative organizational formats.

Starter Links: TokenX

Project that blends news articles from popular and alternative sources.

“News Reader is software for reading and playing the network news environment. News Reader initially offers the current “top stories” from Yahoo! News — which are always drawn from mainstream sources. Playing these stories brings forth texts generated from alternative press stories, portions of which are (through interaction) introduced into the starting texts, gradually altering them. News Reader is an artwork designed for daily use, providing an at times humorous, at times disturbing experience of our news and the chains of language that run through it.”

Starter Links: Project description

Transliteracies Research Report By Brooke Belisle

Program by Chirag Mehta that tracks the frequency of word usage in presidential speeches dating back to 1776.

“The above tag cloud shows the popularity, frequency, and trends in the usages of words within speeches, official documents, declarations, and letters written by the Presidents of the US between 1776 – 2006 AD. The dataset consists of over 360 documents downloaded from Encyclopedia Britannica and ThisNation.com. Once the documents have been dated and converted to plain-text, my tag-cloud-generation script goes through every text chronologically and makes a list of all the unique words that have been used and counts how many times each word is used.”(From the project web site.)

Starter Links: Home Page

Published in October 2006, the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume I has been made simultaneously available on free CD-rom and online. The collection is published by the Electronic Literature Organzation and edited by N. Katherine Hayles, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, and Stephanie Strickland.

“The 60 works included in the Electronic Literature Collection present a broad overview of the field of electronic literature, including selected works in new media forms such as hypertext fiction, kinetic poetry, generative and combinatory forms, network writing, codework, 3D, and narrative animations. Contributors include authors and artists from the USA, Canada, UK, France, Germany, and Australia. Each work is framed with brief editorial and author descriptions, and tagged with descriptive keywords. The CD-ROM of the Collection runs on both Macintosh and Windows platforms and is published in a case appropriate for library processing, marking, and distribution. Free copies of the CD-ROM can be requested from The Electronic Literature Organization.” (Electronic Literature Organization).

Starter Links: Electronic Literature Collection, Volume I | Press Release announcing the collection | The original Call for Works |

Summary:
The Book after the Book by Giselle Beiguelman (1999) is an extended commentary upon online reading in the form of an online hypertext. Set against a flickering background of javascript, the prologue reads, “After more than 500 years, we are facing the development of a new form of written culture which is an hybrid of digital and printed substrata. The library idea does not organize knowledge anymore. It functions as node of a network, a set of revolving shelves, a new reading machine.” Modeled after Jorge Luis Borges’ “Book of Sand,” The Book after the Book seeks an understanding of the ways in which hypertext and online reading change the ways we think about the book as volume, the library as place, and the relationship between image and text. The work includes the artist’s commentary on online reading as well as a repository of links to various “ways of reading” online. (more…)

Online exhibit and resource that mines web-logs for emotional phrases and adds them to a navigable database.

“Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 – 20,000 new feelings per day.” (From the web site.)

Starter Links: wefeelfine.org

Online exhibit that presents 100 snapshots from leading news sources in a grid updated every hour.

“Every hour, 10×10 scans the RSS feeds of several leading international news sources, and performs an elaborate process of weighted linguistic analysis on the text contained in their top news stories. After this process, conclusions are automatically drawn about the hour’s most important words. The top 100 words are chosen, along with 100 corresponding images, culled from the source news stories. At the end of each day, month, and year, 10×10 looks back through its archives to conclude the top 100 words for the given time period. In this way, a constantly evolving record of our world is formed, based on prominent world events, without any human input.” (From the web site.)

Starter Links: tenbyten.org | number27.org (the work of Jonathan Harris)

“The Book after the Book is a hypertextual and visual essay about cyber-literature and the net_reading/writing_condition. Its main focus are non-linear narratives, which reconfigure the literature/book relationship starting from the very notion of volume and works that provide programming language a textual appraisal. Notwithstanding, one is not after the novelty of cyberculture nor striving to reinforce the now tedious discourse of the Internet’s redeeming potential as a computer web able to candidly unite all humanity into a global village. This wouldn’t be more than a chapter in the spectacular history being successfully elaborated in the last ten years by the computer and software industry. The subject here is not the no-book, but the book after the book, the computer not as support, but as a new reading and writing machine: an interface” (net_condition).

Starter Links: the book after the book | Project page at net_condition | Iowa Review Web interview with Beiguelman

Transliteracies Research Report By Kim Knight

“The Temporary Printing Machine, one of the latest works by Random International, highlights the ephemeral quality of digital data. The installation functions as a big canvas onto which any kind of digital content can be “printed” out as a monochrome image. Images and text are not printed with ink, but with UV light onto a light reactive surface which allows the content to stay visible for about 45 seconds to 1 minute. The painting then fades away, leaving space for a new one immediately and creating an infinite stream of disappearing data” (we make money not art).

Starter Links: we make money not art post | rAndom International site (includes video)

“El Muro” was developed by Willy Sengewald and Richard The as part of the Digital Media class at the Berlin University of the Arts. The project literally invokes “the writing on the wall” (specifically the Berlin Wall) as a statement about political communication and ephemera.

“”El Muro” is situated in the middle of a room, like a monolith from another planet (the appearance reminds of the alien monolith in 2001 Space Odyssey), and repeats the statements over and over again. These diminish immediately after they’ve been written, just like the political statements (ideas/utopias/protest) in the real world appear and diminish after some time, and just like the way these political graffitos work: people write them to adress the cityzens of their city without even reaching them” (Berlin University of the Arts).

Starter Links: “El Muro” page at Berlin University of the Arts | we make money not art post | Video of “El Muro”

Transliteracies Research Report By Kate Marshall

TileToy, an open project available under a creative commons license, makes digital gameplay a tactile experience through the use of puzzle cubes.

“TileToy is a modular, electronic game prototype for tangible LED game tiles. TileToy brings the flexibility inherent in digital software to a physical tile that people can touch and interact with. By arranging the electronic tiles, players can engage themselves in various kinds of game play, ranging from fast-paced arcade style games to puzzle an learning games” (tiletoy.org).

Starter Links: TileToy.org | TileToy on Ultrasound ‘05 website

Okude Laboratory’s Okitegami transmits email between physical epaper and tablet display and composition devices..

“Letters are arguably much richer media for communication than emails. The subtlety of handwriting and the richness of the context in which we read and write letters are what we may be losing in exchange for the convenience and speed of digital communications. Okitagami is another example of trying to bring together the best of both letters and emails” ().

Starter Links: we make money not art post | Okude Laboratory’s Okitegami project page (in Japanese)

Developed by Keio Media Design’s Okude Laboratory, memorylane is a tablet/screen interface for digital photos, which allows users to draw on digital photos and exchange them with friends.

Starter Links: Memorylane project page (in Japanese) | Okude Laboratory website

Developed by the Spatial Information Architecture Lab (SIAL) at RMIT University in Melbourne, Aegis explores interactive, indeterminate space.

“The Aegis Hyposurface is an art/architecture device that effectively links information systems with physical form to produce dynamically variable, tactile ‘informatic’ surfaces. Aegis is perhaps the world’s first such dynamic screen…. We therefore think of the Aegis Hyposurface as a giant sketchpad for a new age, a now 3-dimensional absorptive medium that allows all manner of graphic and glyphic sketching.”

Starter Links: SIAL’s Aegis Hyposurface project page | The Junction Hypospace proposal

Started in 2002, Brown University’s Cave Writing Workshops utilize an immersive environment to explore the intersections of text, sound, visuality, narrative, and space.

“Powered by a high-performance parallel computer, the Cave is an eight-foot cube, wherein the floor and three walls are projected with high-resolution stereo graphics to create a virtual environment, viewed through special “shutter-lens” glasses. The Cave Writing Workshop has introduced a Macintosh sound server to provide positional sound and augment the Cave’s performance potential, surrounding the “reader” with dynamic three-dimensional sound as well as visuals. It has brought text into this highly visual environment in the composing of narrative and poetic works of art, and has experimented with navigational structures more akin to narrative, and in particular hypertext narrative, than to the predominant forms of spatial exploration.” (Cave Writing Workshop website)

Starter Links: Cave Writing website | Brown Center for Computation and Visualization | Brown University Computer Graphics Group Cave Overview

Transliteracies Research Report By Nicole Starosielski

“Slated to debut in the spring of 2006, the Sony Reader marks a key example of the next generation of commercial eBooks. While previous eBooks suffered criticism for their bulky appearances, hard-to-read screens, and limited availability of downloadable works, Sony claims to have resolved these problems through its use of new technologies that include e-ink, “electronic paper,” and a “CONNECT store” from which customers can purchase various downloadable texts. At the time of this writing, the product has not yet been released, but the pre-release reviews of the Reader have been extremely positive across a variety of technology-centered forums.” (from Lisa Swanstron’s Research Report)

Transliteracies Research Report By Lisa Swanstrom

Innovative method for creating organizational structures and ontologies online.

“The Semantic Web provides a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries. It is a collaborative effort led by W3C with participation from a large number of researchers and industrial partners. It is based on the Resource Description Framework (RDF)” (W3C).

Starter Links: Glossary definition | W3C

Transliteracies Research Report By Angus Forbes

Summary:
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) uses the term “the semantic web” as an umbrella identifier to refer to a number of initiatives that enable developers and archivists to add rich, meaningful metadata to digital resources. According to the W3C, the major reason for theses initiatives to tag information with explicit meaning is to make “it easier for machines to automatically process and integrate information” [1]. The semantic web adds depth to the existing web protocols running over the application layer of the internet without involving any changes to its more basic architecture. Currently, the main feature that organizes the web is the “link”—any document (or resource) can link to any other. Additionally, each link is coupled with a method (or protocol) to present the resource to the user or application that followed that link (e.g., by clicking on it). That is, the web in one sense is completely non-hierarchical and unstructured. The only structural meaning of links between two web pages (or other resources) is simply that one of them refers to the other (and possibly vice versa); all other meanings are entirely contextual and must be interpreted by humans. The goal of the semantic web is to provide a richer structure of relationships to define formally some of the meanings that link resources. And in particular, to provide an extensible uniform structure that can be easily interpreted by search engines and other software tools. The W3C describes a number of potential practical applications that could make use of semantic web technologies, including enhanced search engines for multimedia collections, automated categorization, intelligent agents, web service discovery, and content mapping between disparate electronic resources [2]. (more…)

“A Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), is a compact string of characters used to identify or name a resource. The main purpose of this identification is to enable interaction with representations of the resource over a network, typically the World Wide Web, using specific protocols. URIs are defined in schemes defining a specific syntax and associated protocols.” (Wikipedia)

The most common URI is a URL, or Uniform Resource Locator, which both identifies a resource and describes how to find it. The URN, or Uniform Resource Name, names a resource without giving location information.

“American Standard Code for Information Interchange. The world-wide standard for the code numbers used by computers to represent all the upper- and lower-case Latin letters, numbers, punctuation, and related data. Each alphanumeric character is represented as a number from 0 to 127, translated into a 7-bit binary code for the computer. ASCII is used by most computers and printers, and because of this, text-only files can be transferred easily between different kinds of computers. ASCII code also includes characters to indicate backspace, carriage return, etc., but does not include accents and special letters not used in English. Extended ASCII has additional characters (128-255).” (TechDictionary.com).

“The OWL Web Ontology Language is designed for use by applications that need to process the content of information instead of just presenting information to humans. OWL facilitates greater machine interpretability of Web content than that supported by XML, RDF, and RDF Schema (RDF-S) by providing additional vocabulary along with a formal semantics. OWL has three increasingly-expressive sublanguages: OWL Lite, OWL DL, and OWL Full” (W3C).

“The Semantic Web provides a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries. It is a collaborative effort led by W3C with participation from a large number of researchers and industrial partners. It is based on the Resource Description Framework (RDF)” (W3C). (more…)

RDF, or Research Description Framework, is a means of structuring metadata and describing relationships between resources, generally via XML namespaces. A resource can be any discrete item – a web page, .pdf file, media file, etc. A resource such as a web page might have particular properties defined such as “title,” “content,” “creator,” etc. Properties are non-hierarchical and the more properties that are defined, the better that search interfaces are able to sort through large numbers of resources. Relationships between resources can be made explicit through the defining of properties. For example, the resource “The Last Man” might be linked to the resource “Mary Shelley” via the property “author of.” (more…)

Summary:
Collex is a tool developed at the University of Virginia’s Applied Research in Patacriticism lab (ARP) and currently operated in conjunction with NINES (Networked Interface for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship). Described as an “interpretive hub,” (Nowviskie) Collex acts as an interface for nine different peer-reviewed, scholarly databases. The interface allows users to access all nine databases in one search, while results retain the unique characteristics of each individual source. Additionally, users can create exhibits for their own personal use, or they may submit exhibits to be shared with all users. As such, Collex and its relationship to data evolves as users interact with it, relying on folksonomy and user-generated relationships to construct new ways of viewing the information it contains therein. (more…)

Today’s online reading experience is a convergence of search engines, blogs, wikis, forums, social networks, RSS feeds, and traditional web pages (Lieu & Kinzer, 2000). Efforts such as Google Books, Yahoo’s Online Content Alliance, and digital libraries are increasing the rate at which resources such as journal articles, books, periodicals, and informational websites are published online (Carlson & Young, 2004; Gorman & Wilkin, 2005; Hafner, 2005). Correspondingly, an increasing percentage of the U.S. population (73% in 2006) is turning to online resources for work-related research, education. and general information about hobbies, health and shopping (Madden, 2006). Online users now have access to vast amounts of information but may not know how to use it (Azevedo & Cromley, 2004; Rouet, 2006). The risk of information overload, combined with the seductive distractions of online media, challenge users to develop savvy navigation and filtering skills. Faced with over eight billion pages of information (Lyman & Varian, 2003; Markoff, 2005) and unlimited opportunities for interaction, how do online users selec