This piece is called Jailtext.
It is the second part on a series of pieces about the importance and effect of metadata in our lives.
Jailtext is built upon the concept that text is now everywhere. Back when books ruled the world, text was for displaying or reading purposes only, as not everyone could read.
Today text is found everywhere. One can hardly pass a minute without having text pass within one's field of vision.
This is why I created Jailtext. It is a dynamic Flash video that utilizes the ID3 tags found in mp3 files to generate its' content, and the channel information from the audio data to generate its' animation.
It therefore exposes another dimension of text.
Along with the end of print came a new dawn for the world of type. New media is often still controlled or indexed by plain text, as plain text is the most basic human-readable expression of an information pertaining to a piece of new media.
This text is by definition imprisoned in the media file until read by software. For this reason, I used the song “The Prisoner” by Iron Maiden to illustrate the captivity and restrictivity of metadata.
The font I used is Arno Pro. This font was the giveaway by Adobe when registering a version of Creative Suite Premium in 2008. This font is used in part because it is hard to access, like the text within the mp3 file. Also, I used a book font to situate the metadata in a context where it originally belongs (the book world).
The animation is driven by the audio. At times, one will notice (particularly during the intro of “The Prisoner”) that the text is not visible. This is because the metadata only lives within the mp3 file. The data and metadata are dependant one another. If there is no music ( or video, or pdf file, etc...) there is no text.