SPAMOLOGY

IRAD LEE

2007

Spamology is a live audiovisual representation of word frequencies in spam e-mail messages. The visualization is based on analysis of a private archive of spam messages which were collected during 10 years (1998-2007), containing up to 2,000,000 emails originated from various parts of the world. Spam data is visualized in a 3D landscape, where popular words are represented as rectangular structures of various heights, illustrating the occurrence rate of each word in the archive year. Spamology is a part of ongoing research examining the nature of Spam as a digital-cultural phenomenon. The project aims at visualizing the links and interrelationships between the contents of spam, the user/individual and the society, by revealing patterns in spam which may reflect cultural and social trends, behaviors and variations.

Irad Lee is an Amsterdam based designer/artist/musician working with interactive audio systems and experimental media design. He studied Sonology (sound design & music technology) at the Institute of Sonology, and Interactive/Media/Design at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, The Netherlands. Irad's work explore cultural and sociological observations through visual, sonic and interactive means. His projects vary in form and media, ranging from responsive sound installations and mobile music, through conceptual cross-media projects, to human-machine interaction and experimental interface design. His work has been exhibited in Europe and the Middle-East, and has been published in magazines worldwide.

SELF-PORTRAIT

ETHAN HAM

2006

"Self-Portrait" continually explores Flickr.com searching for photos that the facial-recognition software identifies as likely to contain the artist (Ethan Ham). "Self-Portrait" was commissioned by Turbulence.org.

Ethan Ham (www.ethanham.com) is a sculptor and installation artist living in New York City. His work often investigates human creativity through generative art processes and appropriation. Ethan's recent projects include a show at PS 122 Gallery and commissions from Rhizome.org, Turbulence.org, and The Present Group.

ALL THE NEWS

JODY ZELLEN

2007

ALL THE NEWS THATS FIT TO PRINT is an interactive website that uses the daily New York Times as its point of departure. It explores the relationship between headline images and texts in both the print and online versions of the newspaper. Headlines and images from July 2005 - July 2006 have been collected and are presented a constantly changing random sequence of image and text. The new juxtapositions become wrong, sad, funny, inexplicable, and often to the point. The headlines and images are presented with a scan of the front page of the paper in order to reference the original print context and its inevitable digital fragmentation.

Jody Zellen is an artist living in Los Angeles, California. She works in many media simultaneously making photographs, installations, net art, public art, as well as artists' books that explore the subject of the urban environment. She employs media-generated representations of contemporary and historic cities as raw material for aesthetic and social investigations. For more information visit www.jodyzellen.com

MYNOVEL.ORG

ALAN BIGELOW

2006

MyNovel.org is an interactive work for the web that takes six classic novels (Moby Dick, Uncle Tom's Cabin, The Scarlet Letter, Lolita, 1984, and On The Road ) and compresses them into four sentences apiece; these four-sentence novels play out against a shifting series of Flash background movies. At any point, if visitors wish to, they can write their own four sentence novel by using the tools included on the site. These new novels, written by the viewers, remain on the site for others to read and interact with. MyNovel.org questions what a novel is in a digital age. The site challenges certain assumptions about what literature is and, in particular, the traditional distinctions that partition the genres of novel, short story, and poetry. These distinctions--as they pertain to how text typically appears on the static page--are made to overlap on MyNovel.org and merge into new forms.

Alan Bigelow writes digital stories for the web. These stories are created in Flash and use images, text, audio, video, and other components. These stories are created for viewing on the web, although they can be (and have been) shown as gallery installations. Alan Bigelow's work, installations, and conversations concerning digital fiction have appeared in Turbulence.org, Rhizome.org, Media-N: Journal of the New Media Caucus, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, E-Poetry 2007, BlazeVox.org, New River Journal, FILE 2007/2008, chico.art.net, and elsewhere. Currently, in addition to teaching full-time at Medaille College, he is a visiting online lecturer in Creative Writing and New Media at De Montfort University, UK. You can see Alan Bigelow's work at http://www.webyarns.com.

NOTHING AT ALL (HERE)

JEREMY HIGHT

2007

"A detailed autobiography of who I never came to be, this 'blog' is at once about erasure and questioning the blog and is deeply personal. Using half formed images, blank spaces in photos of what never developed as though they are the usual blog artifacts, the work also looks at that space in between. These are not fictions or impossibilities written in absentia as quaintly distant, but directions and lives that at certain points were where things were heading. This means that as each was incrementally moved from in those little decisions in a day or month in a life over time that they really, in a sense they will still remain, tethered, possible, in between."

Jeremy Hight is a new media and locative media artist/writer/theorist, sound artist/artist and writer. He has published nearly 20 essays on various subjects and in different fields. His work has shown in museums, festivals and galleries internationally and in the physical world. His essay "narrative archaeology" was named one of the 4 primary texts in locative media. He is a guest editor for MIT's lea. His work will be shown as an invited artist at 2 museum shows in Russia in October 2008. His work "Floating Points" is shortlisted by the European space agency to be the first locative narrative project to orbit the earth and interact with cities in its flight path.