Eidolon was a group of visual artists and computer programmers active between 1999 and 2004. Eidolon was comprised of Sean Whalen and Paul Tulipana. The works of Eidolon have been commissioned and exhibited by online and physical galleries world-wide, and are collected at various online art preservation institutions.
Abstracting the Internet (2000)
- Output as Image: View image data from three million websites as interpreted by the ATI engine.
- Raw Output: View raw data from three million websites as interpreted by the ATI engine.
"Digital information for example, is not content. 0's and 1's are merely self signifiers and hold no meaning beyond their differentiation. They hold no symbolic content. In terms of computation, content is content only as a model of the content object, a hyper-simulation shaped from the elemental signs of 0's and 1's as autonomous mathematical entities. The lowest level of symbolic data structure as agency are therefore linguistic functions enabling complexity to arise in relationships of 'if, then, and, else, do, while.' It seems apparent that digital content is an aggregate of such linguistic abstractions, the datum."
Abstracting the internet is a crawler program, which recurses through links on the internet, grabbing one byte from each page it visits. it outputs 100kb files, each constructed from data deriving from 100,000 websites. The goal of Abstracting the internet is to non-symbolically represent the entire internet in a simple data form.
