Web

The increased availability of cheap storage and content management systems (CMS) often makes us to think of data as something eternal. But digital data dies every second, making place for new bytes in a never-ending cycle. This process of destruction and construction is the dynamic canvas on which cultures and languages flow.

UPDATE `me` is an allegory of that contemporary phenomenon. It presents itself as some sort of digital, public blackboard that anyone can read, modify of erase. By contributing to the piece, the visitor has to destroy the work of other users: doing so reveals the frailty of her own creation that is, one day or another, to be replaced by that of an anonymous visitor.

By transforming an apparently stable interface into a constantly moving space that gives rise to all kinds of communication games, the software proposes a critical perspective on database technologies.

Interactive Scenario

Upon entering the homepage, the visitor is shown a piece of text enclosed in a rectangular area. She can choose to leave the text as is, modify it, or replace it with something new. When doing so, the old piece of text is utterly annihilated, without any possibility of backing up. Only the period of its existence is to be remembered, as a timestamped mark in a separate section of the website.

Dynamic Worlds is a project that I started working on during winter 2004-2005. I had this idea of using traditional webdev tools (PHP, HTML forms and CSS) to create art pieces that would be interactive, but that would have a more "static" feeling than work produced with action-scripts (Flash).

The exhibition proposes a series of small universes that appear as static web pages on which the subject can act. Under the visual layer lies a model that partly replicates the processes which runs real-life systems. Each piece is unique: by acting on these impalpable canvas, the visitor leaves a trace, thus unconsciously engaging in a dialog with unknown visitors.

Interactive Scenario

The user can act on the system by clicking on one of its parts. Local changes, however, have global effects. The user thus has to act within the constraints implemented in each of the pieces.

This work came out of a series of questions I kept asking myself about how one's name relates to one's identity. What does a name tell about a person? Can a name influence the course of a life? How do names evolve through time? What differentiates names and nouns?

The entire piece is based on a model of the social identity process where the name acts as some kind of genetic signature. When a visitor wants to add his name to the dictionary, the system asks him to fill out a form about his identity. The form compels the visitor to choose among a limited set of categories and traits, shaping his identity into a socially acceptable, standardized format. Getting back to the evolutionary analogy, if the name acts as the genetic code of the visitor, the traits that form his social definition would be his phenotype.

By using artificial recombinations, mutations and crossovers through an evolutionary algorithm, the visitor can then create offspring of his own name or others': these offsprings' identity traits are recombined and mutated versions of their parents.

Interactive Scenario

The visitor enters the web site. On the entry page, a short description of the work is given. The visitor has different choices:

1. Browse through the dictionary
2. Add his own name and identity to the dictionary
3. Mutate and crossbreed identities

These three categories of action represent the three different modalities of interactivity that are proposed by the work. The visitor can switch from one to another in a single click, at any time during his visit.

An expert mode is also offered to the advanced visitor to control the evolution of identities, thus enabling a second level of interactivity that enables a better comprehension and finer tuning of the evolutionary algorithm.