"Key down" -2001 about / animation

"Key down" is an installation with a kinetic artwork. elements: 20 enameled metal-slats, elf developed mechanics + computer steering gear and software, computer. Content explained in a nutshell: A computer is steering enameled metal-slats, which are moving up and down. Words and sentences become legible for the visitors by the movement of the slats. The words are parts of the archives for world literature. My software analyzes the literature of the writers in sentences. The new creation of the text parts from the whole world literature are shown by chance one after another. Content detailed version: With a computer you are able to edit and publish text easily. It’s inconceivable that writers in history write their novels using a quill; even so they did it in extremely linguistic quality. On the other hand, information technology extended the linguistic enormosity- enormous in the sense that we are losing a lot of words and culture because technology change is the reason for the loss of lots of handicrafts. This means a restructuring of social processes and a growth but also a irretrievable loss of language and culture. Surrounded with Americanism, computer talking shop and globalization I am not sure if I should call that impoverishment of local language. Whether itt’s true or not, what we live to see is an enormous change of local languages. Like, we are only able to understand difficult poetry fom "Walter von der Vogelweide", through a time tunnel slide Goethe wouldn’t be able to understand a lot of today's spoken German, especially if he wanted to chat in a world wide web chatroom. Reading SMS, where people are mostly using abbreviations or word combinations without any sentence construction, it would be hopeless for Goethe to understand any content. And a conversation with smileys or the syntax of a computer language is for Goethe incomprehensible. In spite of the loss of language information technology are well suited to save, to archive, to systemize and to analyze information. At http://www.gutenberg.aol.de I found a collection of world literature with free downloads. The installation "Key down" is using language as container of an idea. "Key down" was developed for the "Martin Luther" University subject area in computing science and mathematics. "Key down" should remind students and scientists about aesthetics and creativity in using language in a place where people are developing new languages (programming language). "Key down" - what happens? Every one of the 20 slats shows the letters of the alphabet. The slats are moving after another (from 1 to 20) so that you can read words in the red marked area. These words are from sentences of the world literature (http://www.gutenberg.aol.de). After finishing a word (by moving the slats) there follows a short break, so that you have time to read it.