~2009

Retyping Dante

Retyping Dante is a media artwork on cultural products produced through, and social developments surrounding web 2.0. The work lets hundreds of people with thousands of fingers touch the keys on their keyboard. The letters touched by these fingers are collected and shipped to Purgatorio. At Purgatorio these letters are used to retype Dante’s Divine Comedy.

This journey can be seen in our installation called Paradiso. In this room all letters currently being typed by people arrive and fly around. These letters are weighted, measured, selected and finally used to reconstruct, page by page, a copy of the Divine Comedy.

Retyping Dante is a reflection on the current developments on the Internet and the way culture is constructed trough this new medium. Web 2.0 is not about content nor products produced by Web 2.0. Its solely about the opportunity and the act of creating content. Blogs are about writing a blog not about reading them. An Internet community unconsciously typing a work like the Divine Comedy is a metaphorical presentation of this statement.

Through web 2.0 an increasing number of people are communicating more freely through the internet. However this massive growth doesn’t encompass the initial design of the internet. To compensate a lot of effort has been put in securing the internet by building massive firewalls and technical workarounds. Just like the walls around the castles, cities and viliages this approach will eventually break the internet and strain its progression. In order to communicate freely we need to bring down our firewalls and focus on securing the endpoints by using safe protocols between these endpoints.

I created Retyping Dante with the following dear colleagues:

Retyping Dante was supported by: