As explained on Mark Tribe’s website:

StarryNight was both a mirror and a map...it offered a reflection of the Rhizome.org community's reading habits…[and] acted as a navigational interface by connecting similar stars/texts into constellations regardless of their brightness. As interface art, StarryNight explored some of the possibilities offered by the Internet: global artistic collaboration, realtime collection and filtering of information using automated software, the integration of user-generated data such as Web site hits, and the dissolution of authorial control.