Last summer, visitors to the fifth-floor Asian art gallery at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art were confronted by an odd juxtaposition: A computer monitor, keyboard and mouse sat close to a nearly life-size stone and clay statue of Guanyin, a Buddhist deity known in the West as the goddess of mercy.

A sign warned viewers not to touch the Guanyin, but instead to use the keyboard to leave their impressions of the deity. On the computer screen, over a translucent image of the Guanyin, a river of words keyed in by previous visitors -- "calm, imposing, wooden, beautiful, serene, thoughtful, respect" -- gently floated by. The words used most frequently were enlarged; seldom-used adjectives or comments were small.

Each word could summon information, but not about the art itself. Clicking on the word "carved," for example, called up graphic lines emanating from the Guanyin's midsection connected to pink or blue Buddha-like icons announcing the gender and age of each person who typed the word, the reason for visiting the Johnson Museum, the person's previous number of visits to the museum (data was supplied by users), along with sometimes startling sounds that visitors recorded in reaction to the statue. A composite of the sounds evoked everything from deep Buddhist chanting to a barnyard in full cry.

This is ArtLinks, a project created and developed by Andrew Herman '07, Jenna Holloway '09 and Jonathan Baxter '09, who work in the interdisciplinary Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Laboratory.

"We wanted to show these impressions to other visitors to the museum so they could reflect on them and find their own feelings and words," said Herman. "This visualization sat there next to the statue, and people could walk past and take a look at it."