I have often thought that tag clouds have the potential for 'art' - they sometimes remind me of the work of Lee Krasner - and now The Swedish National Public Art Council has commissioned a work that presents a visual representation of words used by to search their website. It also compares these words, through the use of colour to the words used to describe similar things by those who work at Art Council.
The Voice visualizes the words the users of the Art Council website are searching for on the site and in search engines in order to find the site, and a comparison of these words with the word usage at the office of the Art Council (for example words written in emails and read by the office staff on web pages). The visualization consists of the last two thousand words searched for, displayed in different font sizes/colors, with different border sizes/colors, reflecting how many times it has been searched for, when it was searched for, how much it has been mentioned in the internal communication and how much it is used on the Internet in general. Each word links to the pages on the server that contains the search-word, the visualization thus functions an alternate interface to the Art Council website. The visualization is updated daily and each new "image" is saved in an archive accessible by the user.
I like the look of this. I am a word freako so any use of letters, words or phrases in artwork has always had an effect on me. The other thing I like about it is that it has some of its roots in web design. It's common practice to compare the words employed by users to the words used by those close to the information or organisation. It's quite a basic approach and it comes down to user focus. A graphic representation of this holds great appeal.