DissemiNET
1998 - 2001
by Sawad Brooks + Beth Stryker
Walker Art Center Digital Studies Collection
Designed as a Java-based client-server system, dissemiNET is a curated and public participatory system conceived to elaborate a diaspora on the web. Creating a repository for personal and social memory, dissemiNET uses Internet technologies to give visual form to the transactions (deposits, retrievals, and loss) through which we experience memory. On a boundary between identity (i.e. national and personal) and its dispersal over the web, dissemiNET is conceived to trace connections between people in terms of "digi-texts," creating a cross-linked, communal storytelling space.
Drawing parallels between diasporas and the dispersal of meaning over the web, dissemiNET provides spaces for people to recall and recollect, gathering there to re-tell stories about their own experiences with homelessness and dispersal. Over time, dissemiNET has become a collection of such stories of errancy.
Above right: Input table
Right: output table
WORLD TRADE CENTER SITE MEMORIAL COMPETITION, 2003
BBC / Baurmann Brooks Coersmeier, Gisela Baurmann, Sawad Brooks, Jonas Coersmeier
"In April 2003, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation launched what became the largest design competition in history. Across six continents, from 63 nations and 49 states, 5,201 individuals answered the call to honor all who were killed in terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 and February 26, 1993." (lmdc)
BBC / Baurmann Brooks Coersmeier was chosen as one of 8 finalists in the first stage of the competition. The work of the second stage was produced during six weeks, between September 28 and November 19th 2003, when the finalists' projects were publicly displayed. Several presentations to the 13 member jury followed between end of November 2003 and beginning of January 2004. After convening for a last presentation of 3 final projects, the jury placed "Passages of Light : The Memorial Cloud" second on January 5th 2004.
Global City, 2002
by Sawad Brooks
Whitney Museum of American Art commission
Global City is an interactive artwork using custom software running on a web server that invokes the front pages from three prominent online newspapers and presents them (on the user's web browser) "mashed" together. It is named after a book on the subject of globalization by the sociologist Saskia Sassen.
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Ghosts, 2004
by Sawad Brooks
Private commission to design a digital installation for the new (2004) "Highline" restaurant, located in New York's trendy "Meat Packing District." Referencing the disappearing history of the Meat Packing District, the artwork creates a virtual waterway flowing through the restaurant, including the length of the bar and the restrooms. Within the virtual flow there is a parade of catoonish meats and other flotsam, which bob and weave their way under customers' drinks and stares.
Sensors in the bar allow customers to affect the flow as well as cause drink menu to appear overlaying the flowing figures.
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Moebius, 2005
by Sawad Brooks (OPENWORK), Batwin + Robin, nArchitects, Paul Yarin (BlackDust)
Liberty Science Center, NJ
Vital Signs is an interactive installation designed to disseminate breaking news about science to visitors in the museum. A continuous and permeable moebius strip of LEDs interspersed with projections would allow visitors to view streaming information from all sides of the atrium. A simple ladder-rung structure consists of an outer aluminum edge rail joined together by intermittent rungs. Plexi ribs supporting the LED’s and translucent plexi projection surfaces span between the edge rails. Visitors can dynamically select topics or upload information from various points along the mezanine handrails. Images and animations courtesy of nArchitects.
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by Sawad Brooks + Warren Sack
Commissioned by Walker Art Center and Jerome Foundation
The Translation Map is a prototype system designed to facilitate collaborative translations and geographically-based messaging. It is being designed to help facilitate worldwide, cross-border, multi-lingual conversations.
It interrogates the founding premises of machine translation systems: that languages are simply codes. This system uses the internet to locate human translators which can help route messages from the country and language of origin to the country and language of destination.
VIEW TMAP AT WALKER
What it is NOT: Translation-as-decoding In 1949 one of the inventors of the theory of information and communication, Warren Weaver, wrote an essay entitled "Translation." Weaver explored the idea that computers might be used to translate texts from one language to another. He proposed that translating texts was like decoding secret, encrypted messages and wrote the following:
Weaver's "Translation" essay was enormously influential and, arguable, still informs computer scientists' approaches to translation. |
WHAT IT IS : Translation-as-collaboration Perhaps, fifty years later, it's finally time to admit Weaver's folly: translation is not a task of decoding. Instead we propose an alternative that is simple common sense to translators: translation is a form of collaborative writing between people, specifically between authors and translators. Instead of trying to build a computer program that can translate authomatically, we are attempting to build a computer program that can help connect people together over the Internet facilitating a collaborative re-writing process. Like any translation, the result will be good if the contributing translators are good writers. |
Interface to begin writing messages
by Sawad Brooks + Beth Stryker
Korea Web Art Festival
1 + 1 is a net artwork created using Java and employing animated typographical treatments to reflect on a series of texts collected from the popular media shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. In addition, the artists include parts of texts which the circumstances and the collected writings invoked, including texts by Philippe Sollers and Arundhati Roy.
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