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

Mar 10–Dec 15, 2011

The words half-moon and the letter a are printed in purple over the top of whitney.org.
The words half-moon and the letter a are printed in purple over the top of whitney.org.

R. Luke Dubois, screenshot of So many journeys may the sun and moon at sunset, 2011

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.




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 Museum and the global accessibility of virtual space. The series was organized by Christiane Paul, Curator of Digital Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art.


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