Artist Statement

I/O/D4: 'The Web Stalker" is a speculative software application for reading and manipulating information on the most popular portion of the Internet - the World Wide Web. As "Web Browsers" become increasingly more bloated and pointless, I/O/D 4: 'The Web Stalker" gives users "fast and dirty," "high protein access" to this media.

After the uneasy peace in the "Browser Wars," I/O/D 4: 'The Web Stalker" is a dramatic aesthetic and technical intervention that takes the situation to boiling-point.

Most artistic work on the web is channelled into merely providing content for web sites. These sites are bound by the conventions underlying the mark-up language (HTML) which describes and formats web documents. Despite the usual artistic responses of deconstruction or incoherence and largely failed claims to 'interactivity', these conventions remain impervious. They therefore remain the most dominant aesthetic on the Internet.

I/O/D 4: 'The Web Stalker" is a unique example of artists re-visualising data-space at a deep level. I/O/D4: 'The Web Stalker" uses the fact of machinic and interpersonal communication across the network, and the technological structure and functions of the network to radically amplify or reroute them.

   Artist Biography

Escape
Escape was formed by Simon Pope & Colin Green as a means to continue to evolve their successful interactive-media design practice. Their experience, gained through working in the retail, corporate and independent sectors of the industry over the past 5 years has seen them working with several high-profile clients and places them amongst the highest rank of interactive media designers in the UK. Escape's expertise lies in taking a project from first ideas through to production; from graphic design to Lingo-scripting, from concept origination to art direction. Escape has worked with Matthew Fuller on both I/O/D and development work for interactive CD-ROM products for the retail market.

Matthew Fuller
Matthew Fuller has worked on a variety of individual and collective projects. In the area of DIY media he was an organiser of the events Seizing The Media and Mediajam. He was an editor (with Graham Harwood and Steve Edgell) of the paper Underground, a free street publication of sadistic satire. He is also the editor of Flyposter Frenzy, an anthology of political xerox art and of Unnatural, techno-theory for a contaminated culture, a unique collection of critical cyberculture. Matthew works widely on the area of culture, politics and media with a particular focus on the aesthetics of software. Currently working with the artists' group Mongrel, he also recently completed ATM, a book that veers towards the fiction end of the spectrum, due for publication in late 1998.