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They never sleep,
and you never know when they might turn and bite you. Machines Like
Sharks explores alternative means for browsing the vast body of
information lurking on peoples' hard drives and sloshing around
the Internet. We treat this data as a huge repository of found objects
and continuous nocturnal murmurings. These prototypes use photos
from personal web sites, ad banners, porn animations, copy from
annual reports and private confessionals and whatever else the machines
can be coerced into divulging to create dynamic collages of images
and text. The results are pieces which are constantly on the edge
of emergence.
This work has
its practical underbelly as well. All of the ingredients of the
collages retain links back to their source files, whether local
or long-distance. By clicking on them you get taken to the original
text or web page from whence they came. The user can also parameterize
the search paths in order to mine a particular sector of the information
landscape.
Future experiments
will plunder sound and image files, make use of semantic parsing
of text streams and generally be more clever and better behaved.
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