e-poltergeist, Thompson and Craighead, 2001e-poltergeist is a website designed to create an unstoppable series of pop up windows that render it virtually impossible to continue using a browser window. Among the noise and chaos of advertisements, the site is designed to generate messages that appear to be addressing the viewer such as, "Is anyone there? Can anyone hear me? Please help me. Nobody cares..."
The link above only links to a demonstrative version of the project that can be easily stopped. The full program can be accessed at http://www.thomson-craighead.net, but due to its disruptive nature it is not advised to casually view the site. The e-poltergeist project is intriguing to me because it takes a concept, Internet spam, that is generally acknowledged to be only a hindrance to an Internet user and attempts to give it a personal dimension that makes it worth engaging in. The program itself is a virus, it is destructive, and it begs the question of whether this site is actually viewable as a work or art or if it functions better as merely a conceptual idea. No one would willingly submit to having their computer overrun by pop up ads, but e-poltergeist asks if there is something in those messages that is important to see and is most often missed due to the massive quantity of spam.
Thompson and Craighead are able to take advantage of nature of the Internet as a functional medium, an aesthetic expressionist venue, and a corrupting system and combined them into a project that begins with the most negative of these assumptions. It asks the viewer to question what Internet spam really is, and whether we are actually being observed and communicated with by actual beings when we surf the web or whether the advertisements we are bombarded with are simply the product of programs. It also highlights the endless and inescapable loop of pop up advertisements in a time before browsers had effective means of preventing them from activating and asks what would happen if we became stuck in this loop.
The link above only links to a demonstrative version of the project that can be easily stopped. The full program can be accessed at http://www.thomson-craighead.net, but due to its disruptive nature it is not advised to casually view the site. The e-poltergeist project is intriguing to me because it takes a concept, Internet spam, that is generally acknowledged to be only a hindrance to an Internet user and attempts to give it a personal dimension that makes it worth engaging in. The program itself is a virus, it is destructive, and it begs the question of whether this site is actually viewable as a work or art or if it functions better as merely a conceptual idea. No one would willingly submit to having their computer overrun by pop up ads, but e-poltergeist asks if there is something in those messages that is important to see and is most often missed due to the massive quantity of spam.
Thompson and Craighead are able to take advantage of nature of the Internet as a functional medium, an aesthetic expressionist venue, and a corrupting system and combined them into a project that begins with the most negative of these assumptions. It asks the viewer to question what Internet spam really is, and whether we are actually being observed and communicated with by actual beings when we surf the web or whether the advertisements we are bombarded with are simply the product of programs. It also highlights the endless and inescapable loop of pop up advertisements in a time before browsers had effective means of preventing them from activating and asks what would happen if we became stuck in this loop.
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