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Artist Statement Persistent Data Confidante is an online public service allowing for the anonymous transfer of secrets/confessions. Once participating parties tell the "confidante" their secret, they receive a confession from another anonymous user with similar interests. The secrets are then rated by the participants. Each secret's "popularity" or intrigue will increase its probability of re-telling the future -- thus the best secrets will "live on" while the more banal will "die-off." The points of reference for the work are at once Artificial Life, present-day confessional talk show culture, and current internet national policies.
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Artist Biography Paul Vanouse is an artist using electronic media to explore contemporary culture. He employs sociology and "big-science" in interactive artworks designed for mass-audiences. His interactive installations, exploring everything from the hand-gesture language of the Chinese Opera to the OJ Simpson affair to the Visible Human Project, have been exhibited in Germany, France, Chile, Canada, The Netherlands, Denmark and in numerous venues across the United States. Most recently, his Consensual Fantasy Engine (1995) was shown at the Louvre in Paris. He has taught at the University of California, San Diego and at Carnegie Mellon University, and held research fellowships at the Center for Research and Computing in the Arts at UCSD and the Studio for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon. Since 1997, Vanouse's work has been supported by grants and fellowships from the National Science Foundation, Pennsylvania Council for the Arts and Pennsylvania Council for the Humanities. He's now working on a collective project called "Terminal Time," concerned with rewriting the history of the world as an interactive cinematic experience. Dr. Eric H. Nyberg, 3rd is a research computer scientist at the Language Technologies Institute in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He received his Ph.D. in Computational Linguistics from Carnegie Mellon in 1992, and his B.A. in Computer Science from Boston University in 1983. Dr. Nyberg worked for 3 years in the Knowledge Based Systems group at GTE Laboratories before joining CMU in 1986. He has authored or co-authored over 60 papers, technical reports and presentations in the areas of natural language processing, machine translation, and language prosthesis for the speech-impaired.
Dr. Nyberg's most recent work in the area of machine text
is the realitymachine,
a Burroughs/Gysin-style cutup engine, with support for
user submission of raw text, editing of machine results,
and saving of results for group browsing. realitymachine
made its debut in the the June '97 edition of SWITCH.
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