Digital art hub Rhizome joins Wikipedia, Reddit, the Internet Archive, and others in Wednesday’s blackout in protest of the Stop Internet Piracy Act and its Senate counterpart, the PROTECT IP Act, which it calls “‘blacklist’ creating legislation.”

Noting that passage of the Stop Online Piracy Act, now being debated in Congress, “would be devastating to the free and open web,” Wikipedia announced Monday that it’ll black out its English-language site Wednesday in protest of the bill.

Mathias Jansson recalls a germinal piece of videogame art: Palle Torsson and Tobias Bernstrup’s Museum Meltdown, a 1996 first-person shooter in which players can blast monsters—and art—at the Arken Museum of Modern Art near Copenhagen.

Andy Warhol, Salvador Dali, Steve Jobs: These are some of the figures Kyle McDonald and Arturo Castro use in their face-substitution experiment, which uses face-tracking technology and color interpolation to create creepy mashup visages.

“Light painting Wifi,” the Better Life Index, and a visualization of how people share New York Times stories are among the year’s best data graphics.

This week’s edition goes out to the Walker New Media department, who built this site: Classic HTTP server error messages… in cats.

Which museum has the most Twitter followers? The most engaging Facebook posts? This site aims to track it all, by watching the online life of some 3,000 museums.

Having driven well over 25,000 miles with its 360-degree Street View cameras, Google announces that it has completed documentation of the destruction from last March’s earthquake and tsunami in northern Japan.

For Music Hack Day 2011 last week, Berlin-based web developer Robert Böhnke created a hack that has the iPhone’s voice-activation interface Siri laying down lines from Notorious B.I.G.’s “Hypnotize.”