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The Prix Ars Electronica Archive is a collection enabling search and viewing of all the submissions since 1987. The award-winning projects are documented with catalogue texts and audio-visual media. All other submissions can be searched by title/artist and displayed with year, category in list form. Please cite the credits (artwork name, artist and photographer) and only use the materials if your article is related to Ars Electronica.
Web Stalker
I/O/D 4
Any statement of function, whilst satisfactorily acting as a notice of concrete reality which functions to attract and displace energies and dynamics of many sorts, is of course never sufficient. If they work, such constructions are always spilling over and mobilising more.
The Web Stalker performs an inextricably technical, aesthetic and ethical operation on the HTML stream that at once refines it, produces new methods of use, ignores much of the data linked to or embedded within it, and provides a mechanism through which the deeper structure of the web can be explored and used.
This is not to say much. It is immediately obvious that the Stalker is incapable of using images and some of the more complex functions available on the web. These include for instance:gifs, forms, Java, VRML, frames, etc. Some of these are deliberately ignored as a way of trashing the dependence on the page and producing a device that is more suited to the propensities of the network. Some are left out simply because of the conditions of the production of the software-we had todecide what was most important for us to achieve with available resources and time. This is not to say that if methods of accessing this data were to be incorporated into the Staler that they would have been done so "on their own terms". It is likely that at the very least they would have been dismantled, dissected, opened up for use in some way.
Another key factor in the shape of the program and the project as a whole is the language it was written in: Lingo, the language within Macromedia Director - a program normally used for building multimedia products and presentations. This is, to say the least, a gawky angle to approach writing any application. But it was used for two reasons - it gave us very good control over interface design and because NetLingo was just being introduced, but more importantly because within the skill-base of I/O/D, that was what we had. That it was done anyway is, we hope, an encouragement to those who have the 'wrong' skills and few resources but a hunger to get things done, and a provocation to those who are highly skilled and equipped but never do anything.
Links: http://www.backspace.org/iod/
The Web Stalker performs an inextricably technical, aesthetic and ethical operation on the HTML stream that at once refines it, produces new methods of use, ignores much of the data linked to or embedded within it, and provides a mechanism through which the deeper structure of the web can be explored and used.
This is not to say much. It is immediately obvious that the Stalker is incapable of using images and some of the more complex functions available on the web. These include for instance:gifs, forms, Java, VRML, frames, etc. Some of these are deliberately ignored as a way of trashing the dependence on the page and producing a device that is more suited to the propensities of the network. Some are left out simply because of the conditions of the production of the software-we had todecide what was most important for us to achieve with available resources and time. This is not to say that if methods of accessing this data were to be incorporated into the Staler that they would have been done so "on their own terms". It is likely that at the very least they would have been dismantled, dissected, opened up for use in some way.
Another key factor in the shape of the program and the project as a whole is the language it was written in: Lingo, the language within Macromedia Director - a program normally used for building multimedia products and presentations. This is, to say the least, a gawky angle to approach writing any application. But it was used for two reasons - it gave us very good control over interface design and because NetLingo was just being introduced, but more importantly because within the skill-base of I/O/D, that was what we had. That it was done anyway is, we hope, an encouragement to those who have the 'wrong' skills and few resources but a hunger to get things done, and a provocation to those who are highly skilled and equipped but never do anything.
Links: http://www.backspace.org/iod/
I/O/D 4: is a group comprised of Matthew Fuller, Colin Green and Simon Pope. Based in London, the group specialises in digital not-just-art off the back of a lorry. I/O/D 4: The Web Stalker is a continuation of the group's take on the invisibility of the ethical, technical and aesthetic imperatives of software, by focusing on a reinvention of web-use. Previous issues have involved collaboration with producers of images, text and sound: to work in and between applications; develop intimate choreographies of use against the normalised user; to develop interfaces that work away from the eye.