144.17 Degrees

Excerpt from university documentation:

After the 'internet love affair' prompt, I had a vague idea of creating a visual piece with a line of words being a link between two objects. The idea being that the text both spans and creates the distance between people. As communication over the internet is done centrally (if not largely) through text, especially communication between two people, this models the internet rather well.

I started to think about what text I wanted to use. I have a habit of keeping all meaningful digital data. This means, I have archive of every non-trivial email I've received since sometime in 2004, all my IM chatlogs since 2005 and some before, nearly every picture I've ever been sent or taken, nearly all the text files I've made, and a bunch of other things. This provides me with a large body of text to use and manipulate in any way I see fit. I decided to use the chatlogs in this project, because they are conversations (almost entirely) between two people, and thus have a certain amount of intimacy.

I decided that the page would consist of a selection of random lines from these logs. From thence onward, the piece was mostly guided by its technical implementation.