L e s  B e l l e s I n f i d è l e s

Tumbarumba is a short story anthology in the form of an add-on for web browsers. The add-on sits quietly in the background, occasionally inserting a fragment of a story into a webpage that is being viewed. The result is an absurd sentence that is reminiscent of the surrealist exquisite corpse game. If the inserted fragment (we call the fragments “tumbarumbas”) is spotted and clicked upon, the entire story will emerge and eventually take over the page.

The intention is for the reader to not only have the pleasure of finding and reading the stories, but also the momentary disorientation of stumbling upon a nonsensical sentence as well as a heightened awareness of textual absurdities (of which only a fraction will be the result of Tumbarumba).

The project is the second collaboration between Ethan Ham and Benjamin Rosenbaum.

Tumbarumba is a 2008 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., (aka Ether-Ore) for its Turbulence web site. It was made possible with funding from the Jerome Foundation.

The photos in Anthroptic are ones in which a facial recognition program identified a face that doesn’t exist, the computer equivalent of seeing shapes in clouds.

Each photo has a corresponding short story written by noted science fiction author Benjamin Rosenbaum.

The stories in Anthroptic combine to tell a larger story. However, two stories that work particularly well on their own can be found here and here.

Anthroptic was commissioned by The Present Group.

Self-Portrait uses facial recognition software to scan the millions of photos that have been uploaded to Flickr.com and to identify photos that are likely to contain my (Ethan Ham's) face. The matching photos are collected in the project website’s online gallery of self-portraits. Self-Portrait was commissioned by New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., (aka Ether-Ore) for its Turbulence web site.

Visit the project website

See a video on YouTube of the self-portraits
Read an essay I wrote about the project
Read a review of the project