Cache, involuntary collections, serendipity, object trouvé, wunderkammer, clip art

Towards the end of the past century a new “continent” was added to those already known. A continent made of nothing but information, and which is constant flux. The metaphor for the Internet is that of an endless sea on which the user is like a sailor who uses bookmarks as anchors in an attempt to grant some kind of ephemeral structure to a universe with no land in site and no stars to guide him.  Although we may know where we want to go, a voyage without any coordinates is a voyage without a destination.
This sense of randomness will be essential to our experience as travelers, an eternal act of serendipity which will take us from port to port, making us gradually forget the destination towards which we had embarked.
To our surprise, these accidental encounters will have unexpected results, as vestiges of our days are stored in our computer’s cache.   

Like a collector looking at his list of contacts on social networks, or like a tested seer looking for hidden meanings in the order of a deck of cards, the stars, or the image results on Google, the authors of this section’s works will salvage these vestiges, these unintended information collisions, crafting unforeseen associations, circumstantial “bays” and unanticipated “lighthouses” to aid us before we continue our wandering voyage.

Thomson & Craighead
Weightless
http://www.thomson-craighead.net/w/nmedium/frame3.html
Online project
1999

A unique collection remains in our computer’s cache after some days of navigation. In Weightless we can examine part of these chance treasures found on Thomson and Craighead’s disc by means of a light and user-friendly narrative interface.
An inherent question in all digital material is the marked scarcity of resources. The size and “weight” of images and sound is essential, as if they weighed something in the world of zeros and ones. The quantity of characters is of crucial importance in conversations and chats. But all of this is an economy of time more than of space. Of waiting time, of dead time. That is why this collection of short stories composed of light objects is, in one way, a refund to the navigator of tiny lost moments in time.

Lucas Bambozzi
Postcards
http://www.comum.com/diphusa/postcards/
Online project
2000

A photo serves as proof of a journey taken. Even though we buy the memory of another in instant, prefabricated form. In the work in progress Postcards, Lucas Bambozzi presents us with a collection of short videos which all begin with the image of a landscape, a monument, a tourist site which we suddenly realize is a postcard, and behind it, the image that served as a model for the photograph. Using the work Cartes postales vidéo (Video Postcards) as a starting point, Bambozzi deals with the idea of urgency, the ephemeral, the banal.
A postcard is a crossing place. Countless journeys coincide in the same place to later continue on different routes. On adding the postcard to the video, this crossing is highlighted, and one memory is added to another.

Stanza
Urban Rhythms
http://www.stanza.co.uk/spain_cctv/index.html
Online project
2005

Stanza once again uses his algorithms for image processing, this time on a grid made up of the signals of traffic cameras in the city of Madrid. The process takes place in real time, incorporating the cameras on the grid at random, meaning that the viewer will never see the same results twice – not even if two computers are placed side by side.
The camera no longer fulfils its surveillance function, and this changing mass made up of a complex urban landscape becomes a testimony on the emotional horizon of a certain moment in the city of Madrid.

Daniel Jacoby
The Impersonal Artwork
http://impersonalartwork.danieljacoby.com/
Internet action
2007

10,800 users willingly took part in the creation of a new artwork. Each was invited to choose the colour of a pixel from a palette of 21 basic colours, and sign it with a name or pseudonym. The project was launched on 14 July, 2007, and ended on 14 March, 2009 when the last user took part.
The result is a digital image which is transformed into a map of preferences: a small democratized multitude based on tiny aesthetic predilections. Each pixel a person, a small cry, a flag.

Martin John Callanan
I Wanted to See All of the News From Today
http://allnews.greyisgood.eu/
Online project
2007

In this project Callanan presents us with miniatures of the front cover of more than 600 global publications on one webpage. The navigator is induced to plunge into this impossible collection, in this visual mass which tells us a great deal about the surface of the news, and very little – if anything – beyond that.
In one way it suggests that this is perhaps the same pointless effort made by the publication itself, by each newspaper and each of its readers. The trapping, the realization today, of what happened yesterday.

Thomson & Craighead
My_Contacts
http://www.thomson-craighead.net/my_contacts/
Online project
2008