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"Salvaggio said that the repeated showings of the video inured him to its full horror. He became desensitized, he said, and ''I had this feeling that I shouldn't be feeling that.'' So he began to consider how he might restore a sense of human tragedy to what, through media overload, had been reduced to just another video clip for him. ''There had to be a way of connecting this image to what it actually meant,'' he said. Salvaggio's solution can be found in ''September 11th, 2001,'' a powerful digital artwork that he put online last month in the Net-art section of his nonsensically titled Web site, www.salsabomb.com. The new work is based on a sequence of 20 still frames taken from a video of the United Airlines jet flying into the World Trade Center's south tower. To reclaim the imagery's human dimension, Mr. Salvaggio has digitally composed each frame not from tiny dots of color, as is usually done, but from names culled from a list of the 2,800 dead and missing victims of the New York attacks. For each video frame, the screen is striped with 55 horizontal rows of 10 names, and Mr. Salvaggio used computer software to color segments of individual letters, recreating each scene. While it may appear that the grid of names has been superimposed on the video image, the tinted segments of each letter actually rebuild the image for the eye. Thus, as the frames automatically advance, the speeding plane, the smoking tower and the yellow flames of the underlying video are readily discerned. But it is the victims' names that stand out. This may sound like digital pointillism, but the overall effect is closer to concrete poetry, in which words are arranged into shapes on a page in order to augment their meaning. A poem about rain, for instance, may be presented in the form of a water droplet. Here, though, the names emerge from the twisted steel and pulverized concrete of the World Trade Center to form a visual elegy. Relatively few online projects have been inspired by Sept. 11, and Mr. Salvaggio's work is among those that are as much art as memorial. As the nation's museums prepare to observe the first anniversary of the attacks, Mr. Salvaggio demonstrates that it is possible for artists to respond to these events without succumbing either to sentimentality or to sensationalism."