Reconnoitre is part of an ongoing series of works concerned with our experience of the network as a “bizarre_scape”—an interlocking appendage to the urban environment with a high metabolism, whose boundaries are continuously re-shaped;accreting and thickening under the influence of powerful social and commercial forces.
While Reconnoitre can be considered as a browser in that it allows the user to access web sites and displays the material contained on them, it is less concerned with displaying material coherently as with representing browsing as a behavioural activity.
Functioning as a kind of dysfunctional browser operating in the face of the ubiquitous “add to shopping basket” button, it seeks to enunciate our access to information as a “journey of suprises” reinstating the pleasure of browsing as technologically experienced dérive (drift) in its own right—an ambient grazing of text, fragmentary, and absorbing.

How it works
The work consists of a downloadable client search engine and a 3D browser environment/program. The work may be shown as a projected installation or displayed on a standard monitor and keyboard setup.
The user is able to input search term requests directly into the browser environment by typing a request after the flashing cursor on the screen. This activates a web spider agent that hunts the Internet searching for material matches associated with the search request.
Once matches are found, the returned material is represented in the 3D environment. The user can decide to display the results as either the URL’s, web page text or the “meta tags” associated with the search “hits”.
The returned search material is endowed with physical behavioural characteristics including entropy (the search results have a life span and eventually decay) and repulsion and attraction which allows emergent interaction to occur between different represented search term results. The resultant constellations of form are emergent, fluid and unpredictable.
It is possible for several searches to coexist in the virtual environment simultaneously, allowing for a spatio-temporal overlaying of search term requests within the same environment. New search requests can be made by the user at any time.
Once the search results are reconstituted in the environment, the user can interact with the material by navigating the 3D environment, pausing and freezing individual search terms and deleting individual search terms.


Links: http://www.reconnoitre.net

Gavin Baily (UK), born in 1970, studied at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art (1990-93), and Computer Science at University College London (1996). He has been working with digital media since the mid 90’s and has exhibited at venues including the ICA, V&A museum, Ars Electronica and Transmediale.

Tom Corby (UK), born in 1966, completed his PhD at Chelsea College of Art & Design in 2001. His research is concerned with deconstructing received assumptions concerning the role of software/computer code as a platform for “productivity” and “functionality”. He teaches at the University of Westminster on the MA Hypermedia and BA Contemporary Media Practice courses.