Singing Website Wallpaper
Singing Website Wallpaper - The Installation
Installation of Singing Website Wallpaper (2007)
On show: March 28 - June 8, 2007
At Medianoche, New York, NY (East Harlem)
Singing Website Wallpaper gives voice to html by re-interpreting code as a musical score and by visualizing the musical scales as printed patterns on wallpaper. While the sound component of the installation is influenced by the actual "flow" of activity on yahoo.com, msn.com and google.com, the wallpaper pattern is inspired by the "frozen" source code from each site translated into a visual set of functionality-related symbols.

In recent years my focus has been on visualzing or enacting "html", or "hypertext mark-up language," which is the predominant langugage used for building Web pages. It is written in the form of labels, better known as tags. I am investigating how this language is structured and applied in Websites. It is this hidden structure my interest goes to: In this piece I am "animating" this grammar by making it visible through visual representations such as symbols and musicals scales, and also through music, and a combination of these.

Depending on how the momentary html code of the site is structured, the program picks a sound file matching each html tag. For instance the html tag 'table' appears in the code, and so the program will interpret and 'sing' the tag as 'a', 'b', and'e', as they are notes in musical notation. 'T' and 'l' - not being part of the scale - are heard as percussive sounds. The same goes for the tag 'head': we hear the 'h', 'e', 'a', 'd'. All notes in the scale. The note 'h' exisits in German music notation, so there is an extra note to add to the repertoire!


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yahoo wallpaper pattern msn wallpaper pattern google wallpaper pattern
yahoo.com - 'head'
msn.com - 'body'
google.com - 'script'

Click one or all 'play' buttons to hear sample sound for each (all) site(s) together.