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.
The Text Recontextualizer (2002)
The text recontextualizer is the first of a series of data reinterpretation engines created in late 2002 for the Internet by Eidolon. It is the first in a series of online applications which ´recontextualize´ - by separating the form and content - user inputted-images. An image is transformed by creating a new underlying structure. The text recontextualizer renders a user-inputted image using user-defined text as the underlying source.
The Text recontextualizer functions to reinterpret from digital image files a sort of what was once a popular design and artform on many pre-GUI operating systems, and generally before the popular uprising of HTML, ANSI art (whereas ASCII did not allow for colored characters).
