Reynald Drouhin: Des frags
Artist(s):
Title:
- Des frags
Exhibition:
Creation Year:
- 2002
Category:
Keywords:
Artist Statement:
Defragmentation of the Internet: with the aid of one or several “key words” to determine the images to be researched (mosaic modules); to recompose the image that you have submitted (the matrix). Des frags is a project using the resources available on the Internet and putting them to use in a different way than that which they were originally designed. The project is, in appearance, very simple: using existing tools available on the Web to create the final work from, by, and with the Internet. Des frags is the defragmentation of the Internet. A multitude of information is available on the Web, and this project allows all this information to coexist together in one final image-a matrix that will serve as a global reference point for the different elements of which it is composed. Des frags is also a “blow” (a murder for players of video games), meaning a “hold-up” of existing images on the Net; the appropriation of the raw material present on the Web and the reactivation of this “dead,” archived memory into a live, ephemeral memory.
Technical Information:
Des frags all comes down to the creation of an ensemble of mutualist applications (in PHP and MySQL), allowing for the transparent circulation of the information from one preexisting tool to another: the Web based text translation engine of SystranSoft (for the automatic translation of key words from French to English); the Yahoo Web engine for the research of images (for the recuperation of mosaics); and the metapixel photomosaic composition program for the final rendition, a collection of image processing programs from ImageMagick (for the degradation of the “contradiction”). All these mutualistic applications, in turn, all function within a simple HTML interface.
Des frags also uses system processing (Linux) that is brutally dissociated from its parent, with the information extracted by breaking certain “Web windows” — a continuous breakage whose splinters, faraway and indeterminate, are recomposed into a familiar image.
Process Information:
Defragmentation of the Internet: creating the positive association of autonomous, specific, and dispersed resources; diverting contingent functions to channel them towards an open finality; going beyond the discordant multiplicity of languages and types of information to create a “melting pot” with a new coherence.
Additional Images:
