There has been a recent proliferation of video cameras on the World Wide Web. These cameras provide documentation, surveillance, and a very specific representation of the camera owners and their surroundings. Ordinary people and places around the world are instantly subject to becoming part of the mass culture - and are potentially also subject to cultural recycling. "The Multi-Cultural Recycler", in addition to its tongue-in-cheek attempt at performing cultural recycling on ordinary situations, also examines the meetings and collisions of all of these disembodied representations out in "Cyberspace."
When a visitor accesses "The Multi-Cultural Recycler", s/he is presented with two options for how to "start" the "Recycler":

Option 1: The default version. The "Recycler" selects two or three camera Web sites from anywhere in the world at random, and captures the live or latest image from their cameras. The Recycler then performs digital image processing on these images to "recycle" them into a new image - a new object of "Web art." Since the actual process used is also selected at random, each access to the Recycler site produces a unique image.
Option 2: "Make your own Cultural Compost!" If the visitor selects this option, s/he is presented with menus from which s/he can select the source cameras to be recycled. The visitor may also select, in place of a camera, the immediately previous "recycled" image, or one of the recycled images from the Gallery page. Since these previously recycled images were created by other visitors to the site, visitors have the opportunity to perform "cultural recycling" on each other's work.
Whichever camera selection option the visitor chooses, the live or latest images will be captured from their Web sites, and processed through one of roughly twenty image processes. All of the processes result in both juxtaposition and merging of the original images, creating a collage which is a document of their relationship as fragments of Web culture, and of their chance meeting in Cyberspace.


Links: http://shoko.calarts.edu/~alex/recycler.html

Amy Alexander (USA) has worked in film, video, Computer animation and interactive media and has taught at California Institute of the Arts and the University of Southern California. She received a BA from Rowan College of New Jersey and an MFA from California Institute of the Arts. She is active in Internet art and is interested in continuing to explore the Integration of interactivity with temporally-based visual art forms.