p r o j e c t     d e s c r i p t i o n

Overwhelmed by e-mail? Singed by flame wars? Bored to tears by ponderous ramblings posted to unmoderated listserves? Tag, a software agent by Keith Frank, Alex Galloway, and Jon Ippolito, can help. Tag acts like an immune system for your e-mail program. In the human body, white blood cells identify and latch onto virulent organisms that have entered the bloodstream to mark them for destruction. In analogous fashion, Tag attaches to incoming e-mail a header that evaluates the text according to predefined criteria such as the amount of jargon, hipness, or ponderousness inherent in the message.

t a g   i n d i c e s

This is what Tag looks like as a Spotlight Project featured in the third week of the Distributed Creativity forum:

When readers view messages on the Distributed Creativity home page, they see a header like this attached to every e-mail in the forum; each index is accompanied by a descriptive word or bar chart to indicate the relative "strength" of that assessment. These strengths are based on statistical analyses of the e-mail message itself:

The JARGON index measures the frequency of academic jargon such as "conflation" or "corporeality" or by the use of Latinate endings such as "ization" or "ism." The HIPNESS index measures the frequency of buzzwords suggesting fashionable artistic or technological trends, such as "blogging" or "open source." The NAMEDROPPING index measures the frequency of Important Theorists and other household names in art and technology cited in the message. The HEAT index measures the frequency of inflammatory, sexual, or curse words, or exclamations and words in ALL CAPS. The CONNECTIVITY index measures the frequency of urls cited in a message. The LIFESPAN REDUCED BY index measures how many seconds it will take to read the message. The PONDEROUSNESS index measures the average number of words per sentence.

t e c h n i c a l   i m p l e m e n t a t i o n

In its first release, Tag consists of Perl scripts that parse messages and compare them to lookup tables of predetermined strings (e.g., a buzzword list for the Jargon Index) or to regular expressions (e.g., to pattern-match unusual spelling or punctuation).

v a r i a b l e     m e d i a

Tag is the first artwork explicitly designed in variable media. To create art according to this paradigm, an artist must conceive of a work whose integrity is not compromised by its re-creation in different formats. The Tag agent can be variable in a number of ways, including site specificity, customizability, and medium.

s i t e   s p e c i f i c

Tag was first released during the third week of distributed creativity, a forum co-organized by Still Water at the University of Maine and Eyebeam Atelier. During this week Rhizome.org was the host for the forum, so all of the indices were optimized for this particular community. Each subsequent implementation of Tag will also be site-specific, looking for different trigger words on, say, nettime in 2005 than on Rhizome in 2003.

c u s t o m i z a b l e

In future releases, the artists hope to enable individual users of Tag to customize their agent by choosing from a menu of possible indices, contributing to existing lookup tables, or even contributing their own indices (say, the "OCCURRENCES OF REFERENCES TO MONTY PYTHON Index").

c r o s s - m e d i u m

Tag is written in a language optimized for e-mail but generalizable to other text formats such as instant messaging or HTML pages.

t h a n k s

The artists wish to thank Francis Hwang, Rachel Greene, and Feisal Ahmad of Rhizome.org for their help.