New Work: Dream Captcha

UPDATE October 9th, 2008:  Hai Everyone!  In two days, I’ve been overwhelmed with online coverage of my Dream Captchas.  I want to give a huge thank you to all the bloggers out there who picked it up:  Neatorama (first!), Boing Boing, Gizmodo, Make:, Etre, OhGizmo!, Pixel-Shack, GEARFUSE, Unplggd, and so many more!  Thank you so much.

Also, the work is for sale.  The Dream Captchas will be made in a limited edition of 23.  Please send an Email to jeff (at) gus23 (dot) com for pricing information. 

 

I recently created new work called Dream Captcha. In a way, it’s made in a variable edition. But as of right now when this is published, there are only two. More are in the works. Please click here to see them on my site, but they are also pictured below.

Dream Captcha, #1
2008
mixed media
12″ x 35″ (30.5cm x 88.9cm)

Dream Captcha is a play on the idea of a traditional Ojibwa dreamcatcher and the technology of CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart).

So the idea of the dreamcatcher is something I’ve been exposed to since I was a young kid. In elementary school we learned how to make them. When I went on school trips to historic Waterloo Village in New Jersey, we saw them on display. After reading the entry on dreamcatchers in Wikipedia, it was interesting to read that they’ve become somewhat “tacky and over-commercialized due to their acceptance in popular culture”. I’m definitely from a generation that saw it as part of popular culture, kind of like it was the thing-to-do to wear a ‘holy rosary’ as a necklace.

Then there’s the idea of Captcha. Silly trivia: I went to Carnegie Mellon University where the Captcha technology was developed. Don’t you love that? As Wikipedia defines it, a Captcha “is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to ensure that the response is not generated by a computer”. You’ve probably encountered a Captcha before. You’re at a website, about to fill in a comment, and then the website asks you to type the letters you see in a box—the letters are all squiggly and distorted. Basically, a robot can’t read those letters, but a human can, so hurray, the site isn’t overloaded with spam and porn and whatnot. However, the Captcha technology isn’t limited to squiggly letters, and in fact, is readily deciphered by newer robots today.

As a side note, the latest version of the Captcha technology is called reCaptcha, and is the preferred choice. Not only is it more difficult for robots to decipher, but it’s also putting our human effort to work! I love this: so now that we’re in the digital age, tons of books are being turned into digital files. How do you do that? By scanning the pages, of course, and then having a robot read the images of words. But, sometimes the scanned image distorts the words such that the robot can’t read the letters. Oh Noes! So, the smart computer scientists utilized all of us humans during these seconds of Captcha deciphering to help the robots turn books into files. Yay!

Dream Captcha, #1, detail

Anyway, so here comes the artwork! I’m really interested in the relationship between my identity and the Internet. I’m interested in how I can become someone else or learn more about myself by using the Internet. Regardless of what that identity is, Dream Captcha is a work about protecting that identity.

Dream Captcha, #2
2008
mixed media
12″ x 38″ (30.5cm x 96.5cm)

The original idea of a dreamcatcher is an object to protect sleeping children from nightmares. And you can argue that one use of Captcha is to protect a website’s identity. Therefore, a main expression of the work is obviously protection. Another idea that arises is what I’m beginning to see as a thread connecting a lot of my work, and that’s the idea of superficiality. There’s a comment going on here about the appropriation of a sacred object that’s already been objectified in popular culture. And then there’s the use of a technology that’s already seen its heyday.

In terms of material, I was really excited to use my craftsmanship to make a beautiful object. The letters are cotton fabric secured by polyester thread and woven into a ring wrapped in satin cord. The hanging thingies are polyester batting and tulle, topped with a plastic bead. During my work with my Mouse Drawings and Tagged 3.0, I discovered that the Internet is designed in a hard-edged, grid-like way. So I was walking in the Garment District and I passed a fabric store with this grid-like tulle fabric just chillin’ outside, and I was like, “omg, the Intarweb!”. So I grabbed a few yards, and some of the batting (gray is so computer-ish) and had it in my studio even before I tried to figure out what I could use as that part of the dreamcatcher.

Dream Captcha, #2, detail

The hanging thingies was the hardest part to conceptualize for Dream Captcha. I knew that the idea of the feathers and other small tokens hanging from a true dreamcatcher were sacred objects. So I thought, ‘what is sacred to an Internet user’? I even asked my buddies on Twitter. In the end, I took artistic liberties and forced myself away from being so heavy on the idea. The concept was to make an object that was similar to a dreamcatcher. Whether or not the tulle and batting are ‘sacred’ to an Internet user, who knows, but I’m glad I used materials that I knew had some kind of idea related to the Internet (especially one I had discovered during my artistic practice) as well as completed the look of a dreamcatcher.

Links Cited:
Wikipedia entry, Dreamcatcher.
Wikipedia entry, CAPTCHA.
Wikipedia entry, reCAPTCHA.