…In his first solo exhibition, at New York’s Postmasters Gallery this spring, Gage presented a selection of subtle and engaging digital pieces he calls “Glaciers,” named for the slow transformations they undergo. Many artists have experimented with piping live internet data into a gallery context. Gage’s output in this vein is unique for its simple premises, clean forms and unassuming physical housings. Like well-designed apps, his works tend to the humble and precise. They feel engineered to illuminate, not confound.
The exhibition included a series of thirty or so screens the size of small paperbacks, each bearing the text of a single three-line poem. The screens use electronic ink, and the poems are defined by parameters, making them more like containers than content. With a substrate hooked up to the internet, each “poem” is the text of the first three suggested searches auto-completed by Google, from one of Gage’s pre-programmed prompts. Thus, the poem titled tell me. . . reads “tell me a joke / tell me a story / tell me something good.” “Search predictions are generated by an algorithm without human involvement,” Google explains on a help page. As the suggested searches change over time, the poems change in response. The electronic ink is refreshed, producing new poems from the same seed of query, but grown from shifted collective concerns.
The experience of reading the poems feels somewhat like reading a disaggregated browser history. The visitor confronts the textual handiwork of millions of anonymous strangers. Each poem is a signature traced over and over, until it can’t be recognized as the name of one person. Gage’s prompts are baited hooks in a crowded sea.
The artist explains that, because of the massive volume of data harvested by Google’s search-predicting algorithm, the auto-completed suggestions tend to linger for a long time. Still, some day in the future each screen will have depolarized and reconfigured, revealing something about the appetites of the new moment by crystallizing a fresh new poem.
RePaper – 2.7″ Graphic eInk Development Board – SM027: Ever since the Kindle eReader came out, we’ve been wanting a nice small graphical eInk display that is easy to use with a microcontroller. And finally our desires have been fulfilled with the rePaper 2.7″ development board from Pervasive Displays! We’re excited to offer this very interesting display breakout for hackers who want to start playing with small eInk displays. Read more.
Every Tuesday is Art Tuesday here at Adafruit! Today we celebrate artists and makers from around the world who are designing innovative and creative works using technology, science, electronics and more. You can start your own career as an artist today with Adafruit’s conductive paints, art-related electronics kits, LEDs, wearables, 3D printers and more! Make your most imaginative designs come to life with our helpful tutorials from the Adafruit Learning System. And don’t forget to check in every Art Tuesday for more artistic inspiration here on the Adafruit Blog!
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Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.