We were going to make a whole load of art with captcha images, those deliberately distorted or occluded images you see when signing up for online services. They present a challenge that's easy for pattern-recognising humans and hard for computers, and thus mark the (temporary and rear-guard?) boundary in the struggle between technology-wielding spammers and biology-wielding real people.
So we made a start with some harvested from Yahoo groups: here's a stack of captcha images, and then here a ring of captcha images, but then we found that Patrick Swieskowski had done so much better: his captcha poems change every few seconds - he's got at the essential thing, that alone, or in combination, they occasionally become indistinguishable from concrete poetry (see the oar near the middle of the stack one? Beautiful, and could have come straight off Ian Hamilton Finlay's press). So we'll captcha no more, in acknowledgement of Patrick's higher achievements.
Also: the Captcha project, NYT's Human or Computer? Take This Test (registration may be required), and the The Godel Captcha.
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