STARRYNIGHT

ALEX GALLOWAY, MARK TRIBE, AND MARTIN WATTENBERG
1999

StarryNight was developed as an artistic interface for the curated, online archive of Rhizome’s email discussion list, an important forum for artists working with new forms of media in the late 1990s. Each week, selected messages from the list—including critical exchanges, sharing resources and information, and artwork in email form—were saved to the archive, which was called Textbase.

In StarryNight, each email in the archive was represented by a glowing point of light against a dark background, which would increase in brightness each time its corresponding message was accessed in the archive. Users could navigate among them by selecting assigned keywords, which would draw “constellations” connecting related emails in the database.

Online again following a major effort by Rhizome’s preservation team, StarryNight is both a classic work of information aesthetics and a rich portrait of Rhizome’s early online community.

StarryNight, 1999. Screenshot, ca. 2000, Internet Explorer 5.0 for Windows 2000

StarryNight, 1999. Screenshot, ca. 2000, Internet Explorer 5.0 for Windows 2000

StarryNight on view at the New Museum as part of “The Art Happens Here: Net Art’s Archival Poetics.”