Night Beyond Night is a net art piece that explores online obituaries as a form for data visualization. My goal for this project was to explore ideas of permanence, fragmentation and the afterlife by creating a piece that played with both the forms of text and image found in online obituaries.

Every day, online obituaries are automatically downloaded from 8 different newspaper sites into a central database, images are then turned into crude line drawings, and then processed again into a Processing applet which uses the text of the obituary to draw a slightly altered and moving form of the obituarie's image. Rolling over the image causes the ghost to change its form into a fragment of the obituaries' text.

** to view this project you need the latest java plugin

As a child, every Sunday, I would eagerly read the obituary pages. I was fascinated by both the scant language and brief details that were used to describe a life and how in some ways an obituary represented the last public appearance of an individual.

As I have gotten older my interest in obituaries has continued. Obituaries now exist both online and in print and this move to a networked environment raises some interesting questions.

What does it mean to have a web presence after we have departed? Can the internet in someway represent a man made afterlife? Is it possible for there to be ghosts on the internet? If we consider a ghost to be a trace of a person, incomplete but retaining some form or impression of one's former self then can one's web presence in the form of an online obituary be used to represent this specter?

My name is Jason Corace and I am a media artist and educator living in NYC. I work in a collaborative studio called DoubleTriple, teach New Media at the Parsons School of Design and NYU, and have a back ground in data visualization and game design.

corace@gmail.com