New Media Poetry: Lewis LaCook

Excellent, somewhat trippy video art from Donna Kuhn!

“why-must-i-be-wasted-to-stay-in-your-world” operates via a set of tag words. A random number of tags are chosen when the application launches; the application then scrapes Flickr for the first image result in a search for each tag. This ensures the images in the piece will always be fresh, and will evolve as time goes on–or until flickr rewrites their HTML, and the whole thing breaks. In addition to this, the work also performs a profile search on myspace.com for profiles named after a randomly-selected tag, and displays the profile details for this person. I think of this work as a dynamic, kinetic poem; as the words and images dance and collide, associations are formed, and the result is a work that scans, appropriates and recontextualizes the zeitgeist surrounding each tag.