A work of net art has access to any number of web services that allow it to retrieve media and also analyze and respond to the language or other actions of the viewer. Web services are not just a type of memory for the brain of a work of net art, but provide some of the intellectual functions. Typically, analysis of language is a difficult programming proposition and thousands of people have spent their entire life’s work on the matter, making small but significant contributions to this field. Increasingly, net art will take advantage of that work via web services.
Web services give programmers access to millions of texts, images, sounds video, and other media such as Flash files. And usually web services provide access to these media in such a way that a database is queried for appropriate results, as is the case concerning Google image search.
Here are some examples of use of Google in net art:
Epiphanies by Christophe Bruno (iterature.com/epiphanies)
Fields by Christophe Bruno (iterature.com/fields)
- You need IE5+ on Win98+ or Mac to access this site
- See also Bruno’s site iterature.com for many other works
dbcinema is a work in-progress by Jim Andrews at vispo.com/dbcinema
Douwe Osinga’s work at (douweosinga.com/projects/googlehacks) uses a variety of web services.
Les huit quartiers du sommeil by J. R. Carpenter uses Google Maps: http://luckysoap.com/huitquartiers
To add to this list, comment on this post.
other islands in this text-fed stream
