The Audiences would be the Artists and their Life would be the Arts

To most of us, the transmission of information across the Internet is entirely abstract and intangible. But in 1995, artist Natalie Jermijenko quite literally tapped into the bit stream coursing through the local network at Xeroz PARC, transforming the flow of data into a physically perceptible phenomenon. Her installation, titled "Dangling String" consists of a long plastic fiber that is attached to an electric motor and mounted on the ceiling. Each bit traveling across a stretch of nearby Ethernet cable triggers the motor. During periods of heavy network activity, the string whirls rapidly; but when traffic is light, the motor twitches sporadically, almost undetectably. Jermijenko's elegant and accessible piece represents an important step in the quest by artists to reveal the mostly invisible realm of electronic data, a world that is increasingly astonishing in its size and nature.