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1. Angels, Avatars, and Virtual Ashes

   An audio piece about online memorials.  The voice on the recording is somewhat high-pitched and sped-up, like the exaggerated whine of a self-indulgent preteen girl. As we listen to the voice reading, we realize that it is reciting a list of comments attached to a YouTube video tribute to a young girl who has been murdered. The recording is simultaneously hilarious and disturbing, filled with talk of Angels and “virtual ashes spread across the Web.” Comments like “I miss her. She’s so beautiful in the pics. Who was she?” highlight the absurd and largely shallow nature of death as filtered by the Web, at the same time as the piece somewhat uncomfortably reminds us, even as we laugh at it, that we are part of the same circus too. Caught up in our everyday use of internet-­‐based communication technologies, we may tend to be blind to political and social ramifications that our uses of technology entail. A kind of flattening takes place when discourse transpires on the Web. Activities that we might under normal circumstances consider personal or private, such as mourning, become just another form of information.

   Scott Rettberg - 28.03.2012 - 12:09

2. Signal to Noise

   "Signal to Noise" is a web-native hypertext designed for concurrent navigations by multiple readers, whose interactions with the text subtly influence one another's parallel readings in realtime. 

   Artist Statement:

   "Signal to Noise" is a web-native hypertext designed to be read by multiple people simultaneously. 

   The interface is linked to a database via Ajax. A PHP engine tracks the parallel navigations and behavior of active users and responds by broadcasting relevant fragments, subtext, and other ephemera to all readers in realtime. Readers' concurrent movements through the narrative have subtle effects on one another's experiences. While readers are unable to directly communicate among themselves or evoke representative avatars in the virtual environment (with one clear exception), echoes and ripples are unavoidably left on the surface of the global text with every followed link. In time, these ripples subside and disappear. 

   Scott Rettberg - 28.03.2012 - 12:28

3. Opening Sources

   Opening Sources is a poem continuously written by anonymous online authors. In live performance, the poem is projected on a screen and the audience is invited to edit the text while the reading is underway. A loop of feedback forms as the audience takes uncertain control over its collective voice.

   Note: the text presented is often English, but could be in any language.

   (Source: Author's description from project site)

   Scott Rettberg - 28.03.2012 - 12:36

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