A paranoid web spider searching for the devil on the Internet.

Digital art piece produced at the Interactive Institute Smart Studio by Thomas Broomé, Fredrik Bridell and Olof Bendt. (2001)

Hellhunt contains a web spider, a computer program that goes to one web page, downloads all the images on the page and remembers all the links leading out from that page. It uses a corner detection algorithm to detect corners in images, and then tries to match those corners with the pattern of an inverted pentagram, a five-pointed star with two points on top, considered to be a symbol of evil. If it finds it, the image is saved along with a copy of the image with the pentagram filled in. In some versions the image is also printed out, and an e-mail is automatically sent to the owner of the page, saying that we have detected that they are posting satanic material on the web, and would they please be so kind as to remove it.

This piece (conceived by Thomas Broomé) was originally part of a larger exhibition called Lords of Legacy, shown at Art Node in Stockholm (2001). I did a lot of the programming (in Lingo, the curious programming language used in Macromedia Director).

Out there:
thomasbroome.com