Starrynight

Made in collaboration with Alex Galloway, Mark Tribe, and Martin Wattenberg; StarryNight was a visualization of and interface to the text archive on the Rhizome website.
Each of the stars on StarryNight corresponded to one of the texts in the archive. The brightness of each star was determined by the number of times the corresponding text had been read.
Each time someone read a text, the corresponding star got a bit brighter. So the brightest stars represented the most popular texts. Users could navigate among them by selecting assigned keywords, which would draw “constellations” connecting related emails in the database.

StarryNight interface is both a nod to Van Gogh's 19th-century masterpiece and a 21st-century experiment in making the Rhizome community a generator for art. Rhizome, a digital art community founded in 1996, has in some cases decided to preserve more than just the art itself. StarryNight is both a map and a community record. As a navigation tool, it was impossible to use without leaving a trace of which texts the user would pursue and which they would ignore. It is also an example of information aesthetics and a rich portrait of Rhizome's early online community.

It has used special software called emulators to recreate the experience of using an obsolete operating system or web browser, to present the works in its archive in the ideal way.