Traces of Culture

Traces of Culture is an interactive art piece by Stephen Wilson of SFSU that compares the web to the ancient library at Alexandria and the encyclopaedia of the middle ages: all are attempts to compile knowledge into a single widely-accessible resource. However,

The existence of this worldwide compendium is not sufficient in itself. Its contents are mute and impotent without methods to search its fullness.

The piece is therefore an artistic exploration of keyword search.

I actually find the quotation above far more interesting than the project itself (I find the actual implementation kind of irritating): you can have all the information in the world, but if you can't access it then it's totally worthless. Actually, that's Google in a nutshell, come to think of it.

He also has some other interesting art projects, all very HCI related, that are worth checking out.