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04.07.03 Raygun, the Evil Empire by images.
The natural associations between images and words are approached differently nowadays, thanks to the massive indexing made by search engines, which mostly use the file name to connect them. Starting from this ambiguous characteristic, Victor Liu, author of 'Children of the Bureaucrats of the Revolution' and 'Delter', has created 'Raygun', a java applet that tries to paint this ambiguity with political colors. This applet streams the famous speech named 'Evil Empire', delivered in front of the British House of Commons in 1982 by the former president of the USA Ronald Reagan, now unable to talk coherently due to Alzheimer. This sad condition of his is stressed by the links that the applet establishes between his words and images taken from the Google Images database. The delay between a word and the associated image, due to the normal Internet lag, fragments the message even more, making its perception even more painful. Here, the software is not optimized to maximize its performance, as it usually happens, but to simulate a mental disability.