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![]() "Where are you going my friend? To the big bright hypertext called Piggy Paddy Ho!" Each day, tens of thousands of documents are added to the hypertext we know as the World Wide Web. In a basement in New York lies thousands of undeveloped film rolls shot by Andy Warhol. At some point someone will probably start developing these film to take a look at them. But - where to start?At one point in history, being rich and powerful was to have access to information. That time is gone. We're now in the time where the filters that sort, organize and contextualize the information decides who's following who. The Stillman Projects were a response to the merging of reading and writing as an ontological status of hypertexts. The name is borrowed from Paul Auster's City of Glass where Daniel Quinn is paid to follow Peter Stillman Senior through the streets of New York City. At first Quinn is focusing on Stillman's behavior on a "street scale" level: mainly what kind of junk he is picking up from the ground. After a number of days (13) Quinn becomes increasingly hopeless when Stillman's doings still seem random and meaningless and tries something new: he starts sketching the movements of Stillman from a birds eye perspective. Each day's walk seems to have spelled a letter, mapped out by the grid system of the streets of Manhattan. And the letters seem to spell out words. Only when Quinn maps his information differently does it become meaningful. The Stillman Projects is a parasitic art-system for leaving and/or following trails or paths (French "trace", Swedish "spår") in hypertexts. It is a system that encourages being lost with the text trails as a safety or navigational help. It utilizes the Web as a Network with memory, showing signs of habitation by, at the same time, builders and spectators of (THE T)OWER OF BAB(EL).
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