nonsite

Monday’s chat introduced me to folksonomy, a term I was unfamiliar with- which relates to collaborative or social tagging. Jonathan posted some notes from Charles Leadbeater from his new book We-think and his thoughts on various forms of collaboration including folksonomy. As wikipedia notes: “Folksonomy is a portmanteau of the words folk and taxonomy, hence a folksonomy is a user generated taxonomy.”

Folksonomies like del.icio.us have recently become a very popular way to store links. BibSonomy is similar to del.icio.us (which I’ve been using in a sort of ad hoc way) but it seems more academic, in that it relates to bibliographies and links to articles more that websites.

I was signing in to BibSonomy, an academic social bookmarking site out of Kassel, Germany and I had to fill in a CAPTCHA before I could register. I became intrigued by these images of distorted words, that evidently spambots can’t read. CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart), as a term was coined in 2000 by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas Hopper and John Langford from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, for a program designed distinguish whether the user is a human or a computer.

So I began thinking about how beautiful they were and could they be generated and printed. I also enjoyed how random the words seemed to be.

Following up with a little research led me to the reCAPTCHA project out of Carnegie Mellon. It sets up a very noble ambition, whereby as we type in the CAPTCHA images, we translate words from digitized books, one word at a time- words that have been scanned and are currently illegible. According to the reCAPTCHA site about 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans daily around the world. As no computer can currently read CAPTCHAs as well as humans, bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs. This relates closely to my research into Claude Shannon and his interests in cryptography and steganography.

I’m wondering if an interesting project would be to use specific CAPTCHA images generated out of historically interesting art texts or articles. It would be an interesting way to focus and draw attention to a topic- say theosophy or early conceptual art and to build out a vocabulary.

Then it would be interesting to generate these CAPTCHA words as embroideries. So, starting with something at that is analogue and printed, using OCR to generate images that are then distorted and then embroidered and then rephotographed digitally and enlarged.