Net Art Project
Rhizome.org
1999

"The elegant 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."
— I.D. Magazine, June, 2001

StarryNight is a net art project by Alex Galloway, Martin Wattenberg, and Mark Tribe that serves as an interface to the text archive on the Rhizome.org web site. Each of the stars on StarryNight corresponds to one of the texts in the archive. The brightness of each star is determined by the number of times the corresponding text has been read. Each time someone reads a text, the corresponding star gets a bit brighter. So the brightest stars represent the most popular texts.

Click here to launch StarryNight in a new window

Clicking on a star triggers a pop-up menu. You can either click "read message," which causes the corresponding text to pop up on screen, or select a keyword associated with that text, which draws a map linking together all of the stars sharing that keyword into a constellation.

Click here to launch StarryNight in a new window

You can use these constellations to find other related texts, and in doing so, follow your interests through the vast array of ideas and information in the archive. Anyone can create a star by contributing a comment, review, interview or other text to the archive. And by using StarryNight, you increase the brightness of the stars corresponding to the texts you read, leaving a visible trace of your activity (intensities are updated daily, so results are not immediate).

StarryNight depends on two pieces of original software: a set of Perl scripts that sort texts by keyword and record their individual hits, and a Java applet that filters this information to draw stars and constellations.

StarryNight is both a mirror and a map. On the one hand, it offers a reflection of the Rhizome.org community's reading habits. It is up to you to decide whether to click on a bright, popular star, or a dim one that represents a text that fewer people have read. On the other hand, it acts as a navigational interface by connecting similar stars/texts into constellations regardless of their brightness.

As interface art, StarryNight explores some of the possibilities offered by the Internet: global artistic collaboration, realtime collection and filtering of information using automated software, the integration of user-generated data such as Web site hits, and the dissolution of authorial control.

Exhibitions and Awards

"A Small Look at Giganticism." Gigantic Art Space, New York, NY. 2004

"Maps, Routes and Shortcuts." The Media Centre, Huddersfield, UK. 2002

" Imagine 2001." Gävle, Sweden. 2001

" seARchT Engines: des(in)formation." Video Festival of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain. 2001

"Interface Explorer." Public Netbase t0, Vienna, Austria. 2001

" I.D. Interactive Media Design Review," I.D. Magazine. Silver medal winner, Software Applications category. 2001

SIGGRAPH 2000, New Orleans, LA. 2000

"Net Condition." ZKM (Center for Art and Media), Karlsruhe, Germany. 1999