Sunrise and Sunset
WHITNEY.ORG INTERNET ART PROJECTS
Sunrise/Sunset is a series of Internet art projects commissioned by the Whitney specifically for whitney.org to mark sunset and sunrise in New York City every day. Unfolding over a timeframe of ten to thirty seconds, each project accompanies a transition of the website’s background color from white (day) to black (night) and vice versa.
Christiane Paul, the Whitney’s adjunct curator of new media, notes: “What distinguishes these projects is that they use whitney.org as their habitat, disrupting, replacing, or engaging with the museum website as an information environment. This form of engagement captures the core of artistic practice on the Internet, the intervention in existing online spaces.”
To see sunset or sunrise, be anywhere on this website. Sunset today: 8:15 PM, New York time. Sunrise: 5:31 AM. Time in New York now: 2:31:42 AM.
Ursula Endlicher View Ursula Endlicher’s website
December 15, 2011—
“Light and Dark Networks” consists of two online “data performances”— taking place at sunset and sunrise, respectively—inspired by the structures of natural networks and affected by weather and environmental changes. Visitors encounter depictions of a spider’s web at sunrise and a mushroom’s mycelium—a network of hidden branching filaments that absorb nutrients for the mushrooms to grow—at sunset. Virtual creatures, a spider and mushrooms impersonated by the artist, are activated to perform different “data dances” according to the changes in their habitat, which is defined by current New York City weather and carbon dioxide (CO2) levels. The spider web is blown into different locations on the Museum’s website according to wind direction and speed in New York City, and the number of mosquitos buzzing around the web is determined by the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. Stretched across the Museum’s website, the mycelium changes in size in response to temperature and grows more mushroom videos based on humidity levels. The size of the mushroom caps floating across the screen and the “caps” of the mushroom creatures in the videos are driven by CO2 levels. “Light and Dark Networks” explores networks as living organisms—be they spider webs, mycelium, or the Internet—as they are constantly changed by different artificial or natural parameters. Taking a look at the networked nature of both data and the physical environment, as well as their deeper structures, the work playfully examines how our physical and virtual existence are embedded in networks.
R. Luke DuBois View R. Luke DuBois’s website
March 10, 2011–December 15, 2011 View this sunset
“So many journeys may the sun and moon” by R. Luke Dubois, the third project in the Sunrise/Sunset series, is a piece of software art based on the works of William Shakespeare. The artist-written software locates couplets in Shakespeare’s works that contain the word “sun” and “moon,” respectively. It then chooses the next word based on a database of words that follow “sun” or “moon” in the original text—a technique called a Markov chain. This choice is repeated for each word in sequence: every two words can be found together somewhere in a Shakespeare text, but the project navigates through all of Shakespeare’s plays. The result reads like a never-ending remix of Shakespeare’s language and metaphor, with his use of “sun” and “moon” as starting points in each sunset and sunrise sequence that is overlaid onto the pages of whitney.org. The artwork’s title—taken from a couplet spoken by the Player Queen in the play-within-a-play appearing in Act III of Hamlet—hints at the artist’s intent to explore hyper- and intertextuality within canonical cultural texts.
March 30, 2010–March 10, 2011 View this sunset
The second commission in the series is “Outlook: Untitled” by artist Stephanie Rothenberg. At sunrise and sunset, a frenzy of faux pop-up advertisements referencing the current world economic crisis take over the screen space of whitney.org. The advertisements are interrupted by a spinning globe that turns into a Magic 8-Ball fortune telling game, inviting visitors to “try me.” The Magic 8-Ball delivers ambiguous messages or cryptic advice about our possibilities of shaping economic structures or affecting the state of the world at the click of a button. “Outlook: Untitled” employs the strategies of mediated Internet culture in which all meaning is delivered instantaneously in visual packets of bits and bytes, yet at the same time, it generates messages that disrupt and question this creation of meaning.
Flash Developer: Jose Raymond Rodriguez-Rosario
November 12, 2009–March 30, 2010 View this sunset
First in the series of commissions is “Untitled Landscape #5,” a project by the collaborative ecoarttech, (Cary Peppermint and Christine Nadir). At sunrise and sunset, fluctuating orbs of light disrupt the “digital landscape,” and the information environment of whitney.org is disordered by ecoarttech’s visuals, suggesting a natural phenomenon. The size and speed of the orbs will vary based on the number of visitors to whitney.org since the previous sunrise (for sunset) or sunset (for sunrise); higher visitation results in larger, slower-moving orbs. ecoarttech’s work has consistently explored relationships between landscape, technology, and culture, and their commissioned work for whitney.org metaphorically explores the museum’s information landscape as it is shaped by its visitors.
