cscv7k

cscv7k is a net art poem composed entirely of hyperlinks to message boards on external web sites. Over time, the links will break as the message boards remove posts and the poem will become unintelligible signifiers without significance. The text represented by the collection of hyperlinks is “Les Chats” by Charles Baudelaire, which was notably subjected to structuralist textual analysis by Claude Lévi-Strauss.

I transformed the original poem by replacing each word in it with a tinyurl code, a six-character chunk of an address that represents a full-length URL. The tinyurl links go to posts in word association threads that are in forums spread across the Internet. Word association is a forum game that seems to inevitably turn up in off-topic forums on any number of sites where each post is only allowed to be a single word that the person thought up when they saw the last word that was posted. The intention is to play with the idea of signifier and signified and meaning being defined by association with other meaning, but also to add in a comment or critique: as time goes on, link rot will set in and the URLs will no longer point to anything meaningful, leaving a poem that is all signifier with nothing signified.

cscv7k can be viewed, in all its constantly-disintegrating glory, here.