
Eidolon was a group of visual artists and computer programmers active between 1999 and 2004. Eidolon was comprised of Sean Whalen and Paul Tulipana. The works of Eidolon have been commissioned and exhibited by online and physical galleries world-wide, and are collected at various online art preservation institutions.
Selected work, 1999-2004
Variations on life (2003) is a series of implementations of the Game of Life.
A kernel-based system is used for the generation of cellular automata. Each implementation (outside of the refiguring of the original Life
rule-set) is a distributed data-collection project. Using the unique kernel method to create a computationally similar
environment to the Game of Life, each provides instead of one deterministic and unknown end-state for a given start-state, a database
of possible beginning states from a static and given end state.
Video haiku engine (2003) is a series of transformations, manipulating inputted text data, in the form of a user-inputted haiku, into video positioning data. The
process emulates a programming language compiler, with lexer and parser functions. The inputted tokens are matched against pre-built arrays of tokens, a series of rules determined stemming from the lingual
interpretations of categories like 'real' and 'fake', 'high' and 'low' (in Bataille's sense), etc. The videos for the video haiku engine were created by network artist Rick Silva.
The Image recontextualizer (2003) is a more sophisticated application to "recontextualize" user-inputted images with other found images in a user-defined search. The Image
Recontextualizer renders a user-inputted image by building a custom context. This context is a collection of images relating to a word which the user specifies. A mosaic is built out of this word-generated context, which
can be viewed at different levels of magnification.
The Text recontextualizer (2002) is the first in a series of online applications which "recontextualize" - by separating the form and content - user
inputted-images. An image is transformed by creating a new underlying structure. The Text Recontextualizer renders a user-inputted image using user-defined text as the underlying source.
ASMP (2001) is part two of the 'Formal Foundations' series, is a dynamic, generative HTML structure which takes as its' input clicks registered from users home
computers and dynamically updates the HTML code to step through an iteration of its own evolution. The end users of ASMP change the work itself, forever. There is no backup. The images are placed by the
evolution algorithm to create the pseudo-meaningful found grid. The viewer is imbued with the power to change the work forever. This is a directed re-writing of the artist/viewer contract.
Abstracting the Internet (2000) is part of Eidolon's 'Formal Foundations' series. ATI is a desktop application,
a crawler program, which recurses through links on the internet, grabbing one byte from each page it visits. it outputs 100kb files, each constructed from data deriving from 100,000 websites.
The goal of Abstracting the Internet is to non-symbolically represent the entire internet in a simple data form. this is accomplished by a process of large-scale pseudo-meaningful data collection.
Selected exhibition
- (2003) ATI linked at transcodex.net: exploring transcoding principles of digital media
- (2003) Text recontextualizer linked at neural.it: new media art, electronic music, hacktivism
- (2003) Text recontextualizer linked at rhizome.org
- (2003) Image recontextualizer linked at rhizome.org
- (2003) Text Recontextualizer and Variations on Life at Playstation 2's Third Place Gallery.
- (2003) Variations on Life participates in the Istanbul Contemporary Art Museum's Web Biennial 2003.
- (2002) Many works exhibited in the Boston Cyberarts Apropos Artist Database
- (2002) Abstracting the Internet linked at rhizome.org
- (2002) ASMP linked at rhizome.org