R. Luke Dubois: So many journeys may the sun and moon

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.