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The Work While Thinkmap presents itself as as data access tool, I/O/D 4: "The Web Stalker" purports to be a new form of web browser that dispels with the page metaphor of traditional browsers and presents urls as a series of circular lines that are the links. I/O/D 4: "The Web Stalker" relies on spatial references in much the same way that Thinkmap does, and they are both refreshing visual distractions from the html series of links that we have become accustomed to on the web. --Susan Hazan "Are the Engineers Holding hands with the Artists?" Continue... |
More and more our choices for "browsing the web" are determined by the top-down development of large corporations but Web Stalker is an example of bottom-up development carried out by artists going against the dominant (read commercial) trend. The creative team of I/O/D promises that it will "reshape the Internet" by offering "fast and dirty," "high-protein access" to online media. Such hyperbole can be excused because, for one, it's free, and because it also offers the user possibilities for taking advantage of the Net in ways that are more complex than current accepted modes of "surfing" demanded by the dominant browsers. Web Stalker feels more like an intervention than a browse or click-through application and repositions the passive "viewer" as an active "user" who is able to revisualize and manipulate the newly released and recombinant data-space. The noisy trajectory of browser development set in motion by Mosaic has almost overwhelmed other possibilities. But not quite. --Robbin Murphy
A good example here is the metaphor of the "mouse" and "window" in computing. Since 1980 the
mouse/window paradigm of the human/machine-interface has gradually gained dominance, till now
very few computers do not use it in some form or another. Obviously the success of this
design-paradigm has been founded on the fact that it was a very good idea.
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