Through his web-based art pieces "caption" and "live," digital artist Shane Cooper explores new issues that have emerged in our society since the creation of the internet. In "caption" he examines the concept of control over the internet and the cultural and social implications of the internet as a method of human interaction. He also emphasizes the importance of context in interpretation. In "live," he considers digital "learning" culminating in computer programs that exhibit more humanlike behavior.

A software engineer and digital artist, Shane Cooper has lived and worked all over the world, and his work is known internationally. Cooper creates digitally-based installations as well as interactive net art. Recent installation works of his include Remote Control, 1999, and Parasight, 2001. Remote Control portrays a news channel with a virtual anchorman. The viewer gets to choose between two "truths," both based on the same story from a news source on the internet. In Parasight, images of previous viewers standing in the same way as the current viewer are projected on the wall. These images change as the viewer moves around. A computer stores these images and gains more with every new visitor. Much of Cooper's work seems to deal with the concept of computers acquiring information that will enable them to exhibit more human-like behavior. He also grapples with the effects of the internet on human interaction in his work. At the moment he is living in New Zealand working on computer effects for the "Lord of the Rings" film series.

Cooper's website www.shanecooper.com was created in 1999. Consisting of a black background with simple white and red lettering and an upside-down barcode, the homepage and the rest of the website are quite simple. There are links to information about his installation pieces Remote Control and Parasight, as well as to what he terms "toys." These "toys" include "poem," "survey," "interface," "buddy," "live," and "caption."

The section entitled "caption" has a simple black background with a picture and a caption in white lettering. To view another picture and caption, click on the picture. Some of the pairings don't seem to make any sense; it often appears as though the picture and the caption are separately and randomly selected. Other pairings, however, are quite affecting. Never does the same combination of picture and caption come up. The pictures, many political in nature, include the GOP symbol, Al Gore, George W. Bush, and a nuclear mushroom cloud, as well as guns, a car crash, and corporate symbols. Many of the captions have to do with human interaction over the internet and isolation. " I sat in my room and started building my wall" appears with a picture of a nuclear mushroom cloud.

It is likely that Shane Cooper is trying to force understanding with his site. The site brings up questions of politics, gender, reaction and morals, and forces us to reflect on personal history and past events that have shaped who we are. We suddenly realize the difference between the connotation and denotation of words and sentences, prompting us to look at images and corporate logos in an entirely different way. Pairing the McDonald's logo with the phrase "Kill Yourself" makes quite a provocative statement.

An image with a caption...

The significance of "caption" relies entirely upon interpretation rather than aesthetics. The pictures and captions create a context for each other that determines the viewer's interpretation of the pair. The same caption with two different pictures can mean two very different things. When faced with two unrelated things, it is amazing what the human mind can do to make us think that the two make sense together. In some cases, it may be a past experience which makes the relationship verifiable, or more easily evident. Whatever it is, while scrolling through the different image/caption results, one can usually put meaning to what is seen on the screen.

While it appears that the pairings are completely random, the pictures must be programmed with related words that connect them to certain captions. This process is similar to the profiling processes that websites use to "personalize" the online experience. In "caption," Cooper feigns interactivity. He makes it seem as though the viewer is making decisions, much like pulling the lever of a slot machine, without making it terribly evident that the pictures and captions are really connected underneath the surface.

Cooper uses "caption" to play with the notion that the public has some degree of control over the internet. Through captions about building romantic relationships over the internet, he emphasizes the anonymity of the internet and the public's complete lack of control over it and over the other people using it. The internet gives people the opportunity to separate themselves from their physical selves and actual personalities and become anyone they want to be, or in the case of his simulated chat room, no one at all. Responsibility for words or behavior is no longer a concern. This potential for creating an alter ego greatly complicates human relationships in the new cultural forum that is the internet. Through the internet, people could, in theory, survive in complete isolation, connected to others only through their Ethernet cables.

Consumerism in today's world largely determines people's interactions. Advertising companies sell products by appealing to consumers through symbols that are supposed to have certain connotations. We are trained to associate certain symbols with certain things. Cooper plays into this by using symbols like the Nike check mark or the CBS eye in "caption." Cooper is reacting to this compression of identities into symbols. This is done all the time on the internet. People are reduced to their demographics, as seen in website profiling, commercial profiling, and the internet artworks such as the Identity Swap Database, also included in this exhibition. The upside-down barcode on the homepage of the website underscores this concept.

"Artificial" webcam

Similarly, Cooper's simulated chatroom, "live," uses identities to create artificial people. Upon first entering "live," it appears to be a live internet chat room. At the left is a live web-cam shot of a man, supposedly Shane Cooper himself, since there are multiple people in the room, and only one cam appears. On the right, the features that immediately identify the site as a chat room are scrolling words and conversation. You can enter a name to use in the chat room and participate in the conversation. After a certain amount of time, it becomes clear that this is not a normal chat room.

The conversations that take place in "live" are not quite fluid and the subject often changes. The people who appear to be chatting do things uncharacteristic of usual people in chat rooms (like spelling out every letter of even the longest possible names). A question is not usually directly answered; rather the response includes one of the words in the sentence. Repeated visits to the chat room reveal that the same people are always in the chat room, and conversations are even repeated in their entirety. When prompted, the "people" in the chat room actually say that they are fake. It turns out that the room is simulated and the web-cam is not live, but a series of repeated stills.

One can assume that some conversations were written into the program by Cooper, but the program also "learns" other parts of conversation from people currently visiting, and from those who have previously visited the chat room. Cooper created the program so that it would learn and record the questions, answers, and reactions of real people who came to the site. Each person who visits the site adds something to it, not just in the content of the recorded answers, but in the development of the site and its ability to eventually form its own responses in the same way. His adaptive programming and the responses of visitors contribute to more and more human-like behavior in the online identities that Cooper developed for the chat room.

Themes explored by Cooper can also been seen in other art movements that have emerged in the past twenty-five years. "Caption's" emphasis on context is in many ways similar to the importance of surroundings and space in installation art. Just as the interpretation of a caption is dependent upon the picture with which it is paired, a piece of installation art gains all its meaning and importance from its environment. Early video art often criticized television's capability to create distance in human relationships. In a similar manner, Cooper critiques the changes in human interaction that result from manipulated identities over the world - wide web.

It is obvious that Shane Cooper accomplished, and continues to accomplish, his goal with this website. Taking the essential components of the internet - chat, imagery, text, and linking - his site puts a spin on the way that we view identity. It makes us question ourselves, question Cooper, and even question each other. Shocking, thought-provoking, and conceptual, shanecooper.com is one of the most basic but intriguing websites available for interactivity.