bitforms: politics as usual

R. Luke DuBois' exhibition "Hindsight is Always 20/20" sheds light on the political and social discourse throughout American history. He developed an algorithm that processes every state of the union address given by each president, and finds which words were used most by each president. DuBois then visually translates this into a pseudo-eye chart, where the most commonly used word is in bold at the top of the chart, and the lesser-used ones are shown smaller towards the bottom. You can see the evolution from words like "emancipation" and "slavery" to "drugs" and "terror." One thing I didn't like was that DuBois omitted words that were common in more than one address, in order to find a vocabulary unique to each president. I find this misleading, since seeing the cyclical nature of history is worth observing.

Also at his exhibition was a sound piece that stretched out the national anthem for four years, creating a white-noise effect. It didn't have enough range for me to want to listen, but the concept was nice. The idea of stretching out a song has been done before though, with Wagner's Ring Cycle opera.