The Agent’s Story at the Whitney
A new collaborative piece, the second manifestation of The Impermanence Agent, is now online at the Whitney Museum’s Artport.
The piece is called The Agent’s Story. Because the project’s goal is to evolve over the course of the month — starting out as my unaltered story now, and moving to something containing almost none of my words within a few weeks — it might even be interesting enough for folks to visit more than once during February (not to press my luck). Here’s the description from the website:
The Impermanence Agent began in 1998 as a storytelling Web agent that customized its texts and images based on monitoring of each reader’s Web browsing. Five years later, the project is turning inside out — rather than showing each individual a story customized for them, it now shows all visitors the stories altered by a few “featured browsers.” During the month of February 2003, the Agent’s story will be progressively altered for these browsers, with the results continually viewable, and at the end of the month, the final version will be archived on the Whitney server. With this, the project’s weight shifts between individual experience and collective, between long-term customization and short-term surveillance, between impermanence and archiving. Most users now will never see our original story, but only the results of many browser-driven alterations — not our story, but the Agent’s. So we call this next stage The Agent’s Story.