web harvested work

Every Word I Saved (Book) is the second in a series of works based on a database of every word that the artist has written saved in his various computers since 2002. In this work, the database is printed in its entirety, in a format that vaguely resembles a ledger. Words are keyed for their origin, and they are accompanied by a time stamp that reflects when they were saved. The 11x17in. book contains over 300 pages, and it is fully navigable. By hand.

(Source: artist's description on project website)

Every Word I Saved is a software piece that continuously displays every word that the artist saved in various computers, from 2000 to 2006. The words were harvested from sent emails, text documents and instant messaging logs, which were put in a database and then arranged in alphabetical order. Each word preserves only its original capitalization; other than this, their original context is erased by the alphabetical organization. Source: artist's description on project website

Missed Connections is a 2-Channel internet-aware software piece that continuously fetches the latest posts in the "missed connections" section of Craigslist.org. Each post is presented one at a time, and is filtered by looking for so-called stopwords. Computer Scientists define stopwords as those words that do not convey the meaning of a message. In essence, they are considered signal noise in the stream of potential information. Each post is presented simultaneously in two ways: one just with stopwords, the other with non-stopwords, and in both cases the filtered words are displayed as dashed lines, akin to the way words are presented in the game Hangman. Thus, both posts present the same "graphical" structure, but have the potential for very different readings. Source: work description at author's website

Quiet time, dead time, free time—call it what you will, there seems to be less and less of it. What do people give up in the race to maximize every second of their waking life? What kinds of activities are replaced by the panicked drive for efficiency? No Time Machine explores these questions by mining the Internet for mentions of the phrase “I don’t have time for” and variations such as “You can’t find the time for” and “We don’t make time for.” Based on a set of procedures we’ve set up, a program analyzes the search results and reconstructs them into a poetic conversation. Interwoven with this “found poetry” generated by the program are sentences that we re-contextualized ourselves; a human-computer collaboration that expands the field of creative writing to include networked and programmable media.

(Source: authors abstract from Turbulence)

Listening Post is an art installation by Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin that culls text fragments in real time from thousands of unrestricted Internet chat rooms, bulletin boards and other public forums. The texts are read (or sung) by a voice synthesizer, and simultaneously displayed across a suspended grid of more than two hundred small electronic screens.

Listening Post cycles through a series of six movements, each a different arrangement of visual, aural, and musical elements, each with it’s own data processing logic.

Dissociating the communication from its conventional on-screen presence, Listening Post is a visual and sonic response to the content, magnitude, and immediacy of virtual communication.

Listening Post can be seen at The London Science Musuem and The San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, Calif.
(author-contributed entry, Ben Rubin post at EAR Studio)