The Penrose Library at Denver University was recently renovated and now a majority of DU’s books are stored offsite. To checkout a book now, one goes to the library, finds the book on a computer, requests it, and then waits a few days to receive it. Along with this move to offsite storage, the university is ramping up its digital eBook collection and subscriptions to digital journals. This trend is occurring at institutions all across the United States. This installation is a response to this trend.

In 2012, 20,000+ books were checked out of DU’s library, of these approximately 8,000 had been scanned, digitized, or had an eBook version. From these, 400+ used physical books were purchased from AbeBooks. These books lined the walls of the Victoria H. Myhren Gallery and formed the basis for the other three works in the installation: Outtakes, Loss Studies, Reading Between the Lines.

The books were accompanied by an Android tablet displaying a custom eBook made from blank pages collected from the 400+ eBook versions of the used books.

The books in the exhibition Materials On Reserve can be scanned and two receipts are printed. Each receipt contains information on the book and a QR code links to the digital version of the book. One receipt is for the viewer, while the others pile up on the ground, documenting the act of book browsing, which is usually left un-noted. This piece is essentially an inversion of the normal book finding system where a library user looks for a book on a computer, then uses a printout to find the physical version in the stacks. In this work the physical book is the signifier for its digital counterpart.

There is only one point in the comic that doesn’t align quite with my own interpretation of the show. Sam talks about my installation as “a new way to think about fine art” and Sandy’s as “an old way to think about fine art”. I don’t see it quite as stark.  I find our works to be complementary and more of a conversation between two different ways of working and thinking about a similar topic. There are a hundred ways artists could respond the library as an idea, I just do what interests me and Sandy does what interests her. Plus having the two installations next to one another makes each element of the show stronger through the comparisons of the two styles and opens up the conversation for dialog between these forms.

via VHM Gallery Blog

So here is the SD Card image for the Raspberry Pi.

How To Setup The Video Looper

1. Copy this image to an SD card following these directions
2. Put your video files in the /home/pi/video directory
3. Boot your Pi!

Notes

1. To play MPEG files:
   1. Buy an MPEG decode key for your Raspberry Pi here
   2. Edit the config.txt on the FAT partition, on the last line replace the MPEG decode key
2. Video files must have .mpg or .mp4 file extensions for my script to pick them up (feel free to edit startvideo.sh to accommodate other extensions)
3. If you hit ESC when the videos are playing it will quit the video and the looper
4. If you put your mouse in the bottom right hand corner you will see two icons, one is to start the video looper and one is to stop it
5. There is about 1 second of black in-between videos
6. I left the SSH server turned on, in case you need to get in remotely
7. You should expand the root partition so you can store more videos
8. The username/password are pi/raspberry as with the standard raspian installs
9. The two main files are /home/pi/startvideo.sh and /home/pi/stopvideo.sh
10. There is a custom .desktop file in /home/pi/autostart that runs startvideo.sh when X starts

Enjoy!

Twenty four analog gauges track the frequency of word usage on the internet. Installed at the San Diego Museum of Art as part of Beyond the Banner the summer salon show. The terms:

Affiliate Attribution Auction Audience Banner Campaign Conversions Demographics Distribution Engagement Hits Impressions Inventory Premium Promotions Remnant Segmentation Sessions Targeting Traffic Uniques Unit Viral Visits

I recently finished a paper discussing my last series of works in the context of melancholy in the digital age. The abstract is below and the entire paper is available as a pdf: Loss, Meaning, and Melancholy in the Digital Age

Abstract

In 1799 Robert John Thornton released the first installment of the book “The Temple of Flora.” This book was the first large color floral volume ever produced. Inspired by Linnaeus, the founder of modern botany, Thornton set out to represent the newly discovered sexual systems of plants through commissioned paintings.

In 1865 Wild Bill killed Dave Tutt in the town square in Springfield, MO. This quick-draw style duel was recorded and portrayed to the public in a Harper’s Monthly article in 1867. Full of tall tales straight from Wild Bill’s mouth, this article played into the creation of the mythology of the wild west, specifically the duel.Over the last number of years Harper’s has undertaken the task of digitizing all of their historical content. When this article was scanned into their system page 278 was skipped, leaving a gap in the digital version.

Writers were asked to write a new page to reimagine Wild Bill. The fifteen articles presented here all have a new page 278 and represent what might have, could have, or possibly did happen to Wild Bill.

The original Harpers PDF is available here and the new pages that were written are available here.

I would like to thank all of the writers that participated in this project:

Meredith Bak, Mike Bryant, Tejas Desai, Clarrisa French, Glenna Jennings, Antony John, Louisa Loewenstein, Peter Mann, Wythe Marschall, John Murray, G. Parker Nathans, Nina Rao

In 2007 the University of California Libraries scanned in the pages of this book and uploaded the files to archive.org. Archive.org is an online digital repository akin to Google Books, with over 1.5 million digitized books. After the files were uploaded the content of the book was automatically extracted and a variety of digital book formats were created, including one for the Kindle.

A piece of software was written to take a page from the original book and cover up any content that was extracted with a black box. By repeating this process for every page in the original book, a new book was created that shows only the layout of the original book, that was lost in the digital copy, and leaves uncovered the content that was unable to be converted into the digital version.

I found during this investigation that by asking questions that are antithetical to the general assumptions about digital technology, I could better understand what changes were really occurring within the space. For example, instead of assuming that the adoption of digital technology in archives was making it easier to save information, I based my research on the idea that something must be lost in the process.

Nozzles at the top of the sculpture spray salt water onto the sculpture which in turn rusts the iron. The piece was first installed at the Oceanside Museum of Art and then shown at compactspace gallery in Los Angeles.

This piece was constructed through the analysis of over 10,000 documents saved by an anonymous conspiracy theorist from September 19, 2001 to January 15, 2009. The frequency with which a country is mentioned in these documents dictates the size of that country. For example, Israel and Iran are each heavily discussed in these documents and therefore appear to be much larger in this map than in reality.

This piece was produced for the Greater LA MFA Show 2009.

The installation consisted of two large table maps made out of wood. One shows North and South America, while the other shows Europe, Asia and Africa. Country names were left off the maps, in order to challenge visitors’ own understanding of the world.

Last year I wrote a data mining application that can automatically gather term usage data from the New York Times website. I used this data for a number of my projects including Geohistoriography and Command Center. I have just released a public version of the graphing interface for others too explore and add terms to. Please don’t judge me by the stability of the interface, some elements are rather beta, and in general the page can be quite processor intensive because of all the flash, but I hope you enjoy exploring how the New York Times has used terms since 1851.

This show captures how America views the world as seen through the lens of the American media. All data was collected from the New York Times, namely the number of articles written about a certain country for each year.

The two wall drawings are representations of the 2008 state of America’s view of the world. In one piece countries were morphed and expanded or contracted if they were written about more or less than average. In the pyramid piece, countries were organized in a ranked fashion depending on this same data.

The animation shows how America’s perspective changed over the last 150 years.

Command Center replays the last 150 years of history, by showing the frequency of terms used in the New York Times. Over a four minute period, the four digit LED display counts the years from 1851 to 2008. At the same time the gauges move to their respective values, each of which represents the number of articles containing a that term in the New York Times. This slow pace of information transmission allows the viewer enough time to register the state of each year while still witnessing the trends in changes over multiple years. As the forward procession reaches 2008, the gauges pause and the present state of history is shown, giving the viewer enough time to reflect on this information. In a final gesture, the years recede as the last 158 years are played backwards in 30 seconds. This change in cadence serves to set up a different reading of time. The 158 years go by quickly enough that individual data points are impossible to read, but peaks can be observed and processed.

A card catalog designed to hold all of the songs on my iPod, 7,390 songs. Each song is cataloged on a single card. The cards are organized in reverse chronological order, that is the songs I listened to most recently are in the front of the catalog, and the songs I haven’t listened to in two years exist at the back. The piece is seven feet long when closed and just under fourteen feet when opened.

Like an insect trapped in amber or a museum jewel trapped behind glass, an orange was traped in a cube of resin. Unlike the former, this hermetically sealed container has a hole in it, allowing the orange to decompose.

The piece is attached via a network cable to the internet where it monitors news and search results for “paris hilton” and “paris france” and displays an average result in real-time.

While looking through the data collected for famegame.com, we began to realize that some big name artists were turning up in the socialite database. Cross-referencing the artists showing at Art Basel Miami with the socialite database yielded 150 artist matches. Using the data already accrued on these artists, a LED ticker was created which, in real time, shows the number of parties attended, the number of pictures taken, and the “fame” of an artist as based on the number of Google hits on top art publications.

This piece raises questions about how much an artist’s work is connected to their social value within the art world. Because my social value in the art world is very small, it was virtually impossible to get the piece shown at Art Basel using social connections. Instead, we snuck the piece into elite events and showed it in various public locations during the weekend.

A collaboration with Fame Theory.

Fame Game began as an investigation into the growth of celebrity in our media. By analyzing red-carpet events we came up with a map of the socialite/celebrity world consisting of 120,000 individuals and 6,000 organizations. We could intimately understand who scratched who’s back. This raw data eventually turned into a full-blown social network, but unlike normal social networks like Myspace and Facebook, Fame Game was intended to be completely open and transparent, just like the public profiles celebrities show to the media. Currently it is Fame Game’s goal to bring the socialite game online while providing a platform for artists to promote their work.

I created a periodic table of elements by taking the first image returned by google when the name of an element was searched for. This piece creates a snapshot of what our culture associates with these particular words. For example, Platinum is associated with a hair color most often, Krypton with Superman, and Lithium with it’s pill form.

Feel free to download a large poster-size pdf (70MB) or the web version. Inspired by Theodore Gray.

The legacy of I Humped Your Hummer lives on though youtube and other internet video sites, just search for hummer hump, and you’ll come across a large number of videos that don’t even know there is a website which began this cultural form.