keywords

"As soon as they became written down, moveable and transferable words entered the market place, and then necessarily the political sphere. But these words gained an exchange value as integral parts of a text – a story, a poem, a book, for example. Removing or reordering these individual words – or ranking them based on external influences would change the meaning and devalue the text as a whole, in both a literary and monetary way. [...] To explain the logic behind this – the keyword planner is the free tool Google AdWords provides advertisers so they can plan their budgets and decide how much to bid for a particular keyword or key phrase to use in their advert." (artist's website)

"This is my most comprehensive fictional work to date. It meditates the fact that most important words in the Danish language has either 'rum', 'skab' or 'værelse' as a suffix, hence the title (which rougly translates into 'Space Closet Room'). All the terms are 'roomy' terms which that opens up for some playing around. It is also a field-novel (describing a field rather than a narrative - to reflect a contigent reality) and one of the first hypertext-novels in Danish (actually it's the only one I know of)." -Martin Ferro-Thomsen

The net exhibition SONNE ORDKLIP [Sonne Wordclip(s)] is divided up ito 14 series', where some are thematic according to the usual rigid encyclopedia principles, while others are more directly related via a single common word-clip. The following, for example: DK [abreviation for Denmark]-CULTURE-SOC, EGO-PSYCH, GO, "LITT", ZOO, WORD, BOO, CHIDREN, CORPSE, OUT, LANGUAGE, ART, FOOD, LYRICAL NATUR. They are texts - or whatever one wants to call them - which, in their insistent overexcited play with the meaning and visuality of language, have no equal in contemporary Danish poetry. We have to go back to the good old dadaists' collages and montages - Kurt Schwitters' for example - to find competitive parallels.

This work was made in response to a call by Metamute (London) for Jam Echelon Day 2001. It simply employs all the words stored in the Echelon system in a program that automatically generates texts using whatever dictionary it has available.

Whenever a user moves their mouse over a text it will automatically re-write itself as a new text. It will then e-mail that text to a random e-mail address (this last e-mailing component of the work is currently disabled, but will be enabled by the artist at the appropriate time - the effect will be to flood the net with echelon sensitive messages at the rate of hundreds per minute, depending on user interaction).

Echelon is the worldwide signals intelligence network run by the US National Security Agency and the UK Government Communications Headquarters in collaboration with Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Echelon uses large ground-based radio antennae in the United States, Italy, the UK, Turkey, New Zealand, Canada, Australia, and several other countries to intercept satellite transmissions and some surface traffic, as well as employing satellites to tap transmissions between cities.

Echelon is reportedly capable of interecepting large portions of the world's communications, including phone conversations, email and SMS. It uses dictionaries to search for keywords that various security services consider to be of interest. Under the ECHELON system, a particular station's dictionary computer contains not only its parent agency's chosen keywords, but also a list for each of the other four agencies. Each station collects all the telephone calls, faxes, telexes, emails, internet traffic and other communications that pass through it and compares them against this list of keywords.

(Source: Artist's statement by Simon Biggs)