More than just stars

Each archived message in Starry Night is represented by a star and can be read by clicking on it; you get to read the message, who it's from, and the subject. You can even gauge which messages are the most accessed; every time a star is read, then it gets brighter, making the dimmest stars the least popular while the biggest and brightest are the opposite. The archive also has a clever way of filtering messages. When hovering over a star, there is a list of corresponding keywords; clicking one will create a line going through the stars that share the same keyword, simulating a constellation. Some constellations are bigger and more complex than others, like "holography," which only relates to two messages, and words like "body" and "internet" cover most of the night sky, giving us a good idea of what discussions were and weren't popular during the digital art world of the 90s.

Starry night

StarryNight, 1999. Screenshot, ca. 2000, Internet Explorer 5.0 for Windows 2000

Who was Rhizome?

Rhizome was founded by artist Mark Tribe in 1996 as an email discussion list for artists working in emergent forms of media art.

Mark Tribe quote

“I felt it was important that we begin to develop an aesthetic and theoretical vocabulary to discuss and understand these emergent forms of media art. I initially thought of it as a place for discussion, exchange of ideas, and information, but also for presentation, so people could see one another’s work. — Mark Tribe

Emails in a database?

Inspired by conversations with Nettime cofounder Pit Schultz, Tribe envisioned that emails from the list would be archived in a web-accessible database—then a novel concept.

What became

Each week, selected emails would be saved to an edited archive called TextBase, with keywords added to each message for more effective searching.

The interactive process

Each week, selected emails would be saved to an edited archive called TextBase, with keywords added to each message for more effective searching. Users could click a given star, triggering a pop-up menu. They could opt to read the message, which would cause it to appear onscreen, or select a keyword associated with the text.