merlerker-LookingOutwards04

Starry Night, ALEX GALLOWAY, MARK TRIBE, AND MARTIN WATTENBERG  (1999)

https://anthology.rhizome.org/starrynight

Starry Night is a visualization and navigation tool for Rhizome’s email discussion archive, where emails are represented as stars whose brightness corresponds to how often they’re accessed. Stars are connected into constellations based on shared keywords.

Representing communication as a graph is not a hugely unexpected idea, but I am such a sucker for diagramming intimate thoughts and interpersonal exchanges. By connecting different artists’ thoughts, it adds a communal wholeness to the archive, and representing it as constellations similarly encourages reflection on varying distances and times close and far. It reminds me of commonplace books and a little experiment I did some years ago to explore and find connections among the notes I write to myself.