R. Luke DuBois: So many journeys may the sun and moon
Mar 10–Dec 15, 2011
R. Luke DuBois: So many journeys may the sun and moon
So many journeys may the sun and moon by R. Luke DuBois is a piece of software art based on the works of William Shakespeare. For Sunrise/Sunset, 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 and the project navigates through all of the playwright’s works. The result reads like a never-ending remix of Shakespearean language, with “sun” and “moon” the starting points in each sunset and sunrise sequence that overlays the pages of whitney.org. The work’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 practice of exploring hyper- and intertextuality within canonical cultural texts.
R. Luke DuBois (b. 1975; Morristown, New Jersey) has exhibited his work at IVAM (Institut Valencià d’Art Modern), Spain; HEK (House of Electronic Arts), Basel, Switzerland; the 2008 Democratic National Convention, Denver; the Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis; the San Jose Museum of Art, California; the National Constitution Center, Philadelphia; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland; Daelim Museum, Seoul; the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, United Kingdom; the 2007 Sundance Film Festival; the (2007) Sydney Film Festival; SITE Santa Fe; the Orange County Museum of Art, California; the Beall Center for Art and Technology, University of California, Irvine; the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Colorado; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC; the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York; PROSPECT.2 New Orleans (2011–12); the 2018 London Design Biennale; and the Aspen Institute, Colorado. He has performed compositions at venues including Lincoln Center, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Carnegie Hall, the Kitchen, the Stone, and Roulette, and has appeared on albums both individually and as part of The Freight Elevator Quartet.
Sunrise/Sunset
Sunrise/Sunset was a series of internet art projects that marked sunset and sunrise in New York City every day from 2009 to 2024. All were commissioned by the Whitney specifically for whitney.org, each project unfolding over a time frame of ten to thirty seconds. Indicating the switch from day to night and vice versa in one specific location, Sunrise/Sunset projects played with the perception of time and space, underscoring the physical location of the Whitney and the global accessibility of virtual environments.
artport
View more on artport, the Whitney Museum's portal to internet art and its online gallery space for commissions of net art.