First Line (2002, 165kb, 7 secs)

Second Line (2002, 224kb, 10 secs)

If I remember rightly Eryk Salvaggio posted a link to this tiny piece
on the Rhizome list in 2002, at a time when the Rhizome Artbase was
still rejecting some embryonic video or video like works as ‘not net-idiomatic’.
The post was something of an epiphany for me and I suspect
when the history of online video comes to be written this work,
together with the Manovich “Little Movies”, will loom large
(As beginning to find a way towards precisely a ‘net-idiomatic’
video practice).
Also: I thought then (and I still think now) it is wonderful work.
Here’s what Salvaggio said about it at the time:

Mpeg Haikus
these are short films which work in their original digital formats
as 30 to 60 second mpeg files. The idea was to stay “egoless”
as in the nature of a haiku, and so there is no design – the films
and the files are presented by whatever defaults your browser
uses. The first, “Unfinished Mpeg Haiku,” is a short 30 seconds
of an airplane’s vapor trails across the sky, the second, a 30
second loop of a bird hopping on industrial machinery.
The third line is not represented, but is intended to be the
viewer’s response, ie. dismissal, understanding, happiness,
sadness- whatever meaning the viewer makes.