[Nettime-bold] Fourth International Browserday report

[Robert Atkins <robertatkins@earthlink.net>]

BROWSER WARE  
by Robert Atkins

from The Media Channel
http://www.mediachannel.org/arts/perspectives/browserday.shtml


Jonah Brucker-Cohen's "Crank the Web" By Robert Atkins
Sandra Villareal, a young Venezuelan with short dark hair, strode
purposefully across the stage of Cooper Union's Great Hall in New York on
March 29. She wore black, knee-length workout pants and matching top beneath
a baggy, vinyl pants suit cinched horizontally with duct tape. She moved her
hands sinuously through the air as if it were water, and after three minutes
on stage, raucous rap music signaled the end of her performance. Not a
Jean-Paul Gaultier model displaying the fashion designer's latest creation
(or even a Gaultier wannabe), Villareal was a contestant in the Fourth
International Browserday, a competition celebrating innovation in software
design for information search-and-retrieval. Her "Tactile Suit" is designed
to input her body's movement and temperature data and to electronically
output it to other digital devices.

Her competitors at Browserday were the next generation of academically
trained designers (no hackers here): 23 other students from New York,
primarily, and the Netherlands, as well as a sprinkling of competitors from
around the United States. (The predominance of New York-based contestants
was a reminder that no travel funds were available for participants.)
Organized by Dutch designer Mieke Gerritzen and new-media activist Geert
Lovink, the first three Browserdays were held in Amsterdam starting in 1998.
The New York incarnation was co-produced by Gerritzen's NL.Design firm and
United Digital Artists, a Web development training company. Despite the
relatively small attendance ‹ barely more than 100 audience members for the
pricey, $25-per-ticket event that consumed an entire Thursday ‹ Gerritzen is
determined to hold such a competition in California. And sooner, rather than
later. "It's not really an annual event," she told me. "As you know, there
will be a Berlin Browserday this year."

Annual or not, Browserday may be the most entertaining, ongoing new-media
art event anywhere. It incorporates the performance pleasures of the Poetry
Slam, the demo-or-die tensions of the software presentation or movie-script
pitch and the out-of-the-box approaches to design we might associate with
conceptual art. Affable MC Steve Johnson of Feed magazine likened Browserday
to "The Gong Show," an American television classic that allowed the audience
to gong insufficiently talented contestants off the stage. While Browserday
certainly offered its share of turkeys, the three-minute long presentations
of the mostly functional prototypes ensured that the audience was rarely
bored. Although characterizing the demonstrations as uneven is an
understatement, even the few inept ones helped reveal the current state of
the art among those in their early twenties at a moment when the retrieval
of information has advanced prodigiously, but the presentation of it has
not. With computer programming-capable art and design students no longer a
rarity, that's bound to change. A few observations about the event:

The future of the Web browser is hardly limited to software intended to
tweak the design or page-publishing metaphor of the ubiquitous commercial
software Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer. The most
conventional browser featured at Browserday, a finalist called "Indra" by
Noah Hendler and Todd Holoubec, presents search results in a handsome,
honeycomb configuration of image and text that reminds us how visually
impoverished the search lists amassed by Google or Yahoo are. But two of the
three entrants that appealed most to the audience ‹ the judges' and
audience's reactions rarely jibed ‹ utilized new hardware interfaces that
made them anything but conventional: Roel Wouters's "Scrtch Machine" enables
users to access online news, home video and 12 other sorts of media and
personalize its hip-hop presentation with a mouse that resembles an acrylic
DJ's turntable, and Jonah Brucker-Cohen's first-prize winning "Crank the
Web," which hilariously "solves" the problem of bandwidth inequity by
awarding the widest bandwidth to the physically, rather than economically,
fit. The user types a Web address into a commercial browser and then cranks
up the bandwidth by vigorously turning the handle of a re-purposed boat
winch attached to the computer. (What about a stationery bike interface to
make browsing a truly healthful experience?)

In a hybrid era when artists write software or create browsers, they should
probably ‹ alebit confusingly ‹ be termed artist/programmers/designers.
Artists have been designing Web browsers as functional art for the past four
years. In 1997, the London-based group I/O/D created the first
artist-produced browser, which turned the connections between sites into
three-dimensional maps. (It can be downloaded at
http://www.backspace.org/iod). A more recent alternative browser, "Netomat",
by New York artist Maciej Wisniewski, creates a dizzyingly fluid collage of
images and texts after a search is requested. ("Netomat" can be seen in the
current "Data Dynamics" show at the Whitney Museum of American Art.)
 
Wisniewski's expressive approach seems to have opened the door for the new
generation of designer/artist/programmers showcased in Browserday. The focus
on the emotional impact of information manipulation and retrieval was
unmistakable. Third-prize winner Marc Lin's "Flexible Navigation System"
presents information panels scrolling in three-dimensions like a Ferris
wheel on the computer screen. Siddharth Jatia's "Desktop-Browser" enables
the creation of a wildly colorful or shimmeringly gorgeous desktop by
automatically sorting your archive of bookmarks into red, blue and yellow
containers and offering templates for color manipulation. Tae-Seoup Yun's
aptly named "Emotion Browser" exclusively enables the locating of wrenching
contemporary and historic films and other materials related to the movement
to unite the Koreas.

There were other, more intellectual (and intellectualized) manifestoes on
view. Luna Maurer's slick animation is, in her description, a "fictional
approach to what a browser could be in the future." It offered graphically
arresting, flashing words and concepts like "hybrid space to mirror
reality," "community," and the show-stopping "the browser is the brain."
(One is reminded of the community-oriented condition that characterized the
World Wide Web ‹ not to mention the Internet ‹ prior to its
commercialization in 1996.) Henk Jan Bouwmeester's "Mind the Gap" was more
stimulating. The gap he refers to is the inherent technical or aesthetic
limitations of story-telling, new-media art (and even recent tech) that
allows for the imaginative presence of the users. With new and seamless
technologies he foresees the troubling elimination of that gap, or in
McLuhanesque terms, the erosion of our critical tools, shaping us into ever
more uncritical consumers.

Three minutes isn't much time to present a comprehensive thesis about the
relationship of society and technology, however. The most impressive
entrants were technologically innovative. The second-prize winner was Koert
van Mensvoort's "Active Cursor." This software makes a cursor slip or soar,
tumble or fall. Approaching an image of a drawing of a tunnel, for instance,
the cursor might pass through it. Or passing over a photograph of an ice
skating rink, it would quickly slide. Mark Argo's wireless "TAP" provides a
personal and public way of processing data. The personal way is a safe form
of encryption for medical records and the like stored in a wearable device;
the public format can connect the device into publicly accessible sources of
information and display it as you wish. The small print at computer kiosks
hard to read? Display it on TAP in any format or size you choose.
 
The most William Gibson-esque of all the presented projects was Demetra
Baylor's "Telepathic Communication." In Baylor's world, portable devices
will be replaced by the transmission of users' thoughts, through the optic
nerve to a graphic interface visible on special contact lenses. Think "new
information folder" and that brilliant rumination you had while running on
the treadmill can be stored there! (According to neurological researcher and
artist Warren Neidich, Baylor's system might be technologically feasible but
only for the ultra-myopic. He also observed that in the future miniature
monitors connected to glasses ‹ which exist now ‹ could emit light in such a
way that a clear image might be projected on the retina.)

In addition to the intensity and diversity of the presentations, Browserday
also offered keynote speakers whose participation seemed intended to provide
moments of intellectual reflection contra the often frantic demos. Media
critic Douglas Rushkoff aptly reminded us that by 1995 gigantic computing
corporations essentially co-opted and dominated online information
processing, from the Netscape Navigator Web browser (now owned by AOL Time
Warner) to the Eudora e-mail reader (the model for Microsoft's Outlook).
Microsoft, of course, derives its power from its interface monopolies
controlling the functionality of our computers and access to the Net. And
the Microsoft browser, of course, was at the heart of the U.S. government's
ongoing litigation against the computer behemoth. Put another way, the
development of new information browsers has been sacrificed to corporate
profits. In a globalized world, this is precisely what student designers
must confront. Speaker Bill Buxton, chief scientist of Alias/Wavefront,
embodied this generational divide in an avuncular lecture that expressed
equal concern for both the strangling effect of science and technology on
society and the meaning of changing the color of your car at will. (Hello?)
But he did lead with a quote from T.S. Eliot's "The Rock" that might be a
mantra for any young designer: "Where is the wisdom we have lost in
knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"


‹ Robert Akins robert@mediachannel.org) is MediaChannel Media Arts Editor.
 


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