Prototype #38
View it on the Whitney Museum Artport website.
Originally commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art for its Artport program in 2002, and now held in the museum’s permanent collection. Created under the name C404, an earlier moniker used by Yoshi Sodeoka.
Reminiscent of a Geiger counter or an oscilloscope, Prototype #38 attempts to visualize the ebb and flow of an unseen tide of spirituality across the internet. A column of words at the center of the screen displays live search queries retrieved by a custom engine, which are then automatically submitted to another search engine. The work parses the results and intermittently presents them at the bottom of the page. Drawing from spiritual terms across multiple religions and cultures, the system rates them on a high-to-low scale, producing a shifting, fragmented snapshot of collective spiritual activity at any given moment.
Credits
C404 (Yoshi Sodeoka): concept and design
Sean Rooney: sound, ActionScript, and PHP programming