Boing Boing links to a fun new toy called Web of Letters – a kind of automatic ransom note generator, pulling letters from Yahoo’s image search to compose the word(s) of your choice. Also take a look at this Flickr version (simply replace the “omegg” part of the URL with your desired word).
I tried both versions with “omEGG” – the title of a work in progress by the institute’s artist-in-residence Alex Itin. I found it resonated nicely with Alex’s work, which pulls on image fragments and cultural detritus, remixing and juxtaposing in fascinating ways. Both versions work quite well, but I found that on Web of Letters (first image) I had to click through several searches to find a mix that was pleasantly legible and didn’t use repeat sources. The Flickr hack (below) is nice in that you can change individual letters until you get it just the way you want it.
It’s a fun game that suggests how the web can be mined to illuminate content in playful ways (and to write ransom notes in a hurry).
Nicely done. omEGG is always about reading random signs in the road that suddenly reveal themselves not to be random at all. Questions of fate and destiny, etc.
So the flickr thing is a neat way to play with that “random legibility.”
alex
“Random legibility” is well put. That seems to be a signal challenge of web culture.