A Fresh Start (up)

I’m really interested in visualization tools especially when they become art projects. But what about building a visual representation of the Internet itself? Everybody is aware of the success on The Million Dollar Page mainly because of the simplicity of the business model to gain easily lots of money, but it’s also a major Net art project that is a visual metaphor for what the Internet was in 2005. The creator Alex Tew even said: “One of my original aims was to create a piece of Internet art that reflects what’s current on the Internet and what’s possible, because I’ve made a million from that image. I want to create an Internet capsule to keep for years.”

But what we know less (probably because it did not generate any money!) is that they were previous attempts to visualize the Internet, notably ones from a major Net artist called Lisa Jevbratt. 1:1 is one of her project intended to make 5 different representations of the Internet. On her site, she describes the project like that: “1:1 was a project created in 1999 which consisted of a database that would eventually contain the addresses of every Web site in the world and interfaces through which to view and use the database. 1:1(2) is a continuation of the project including a second database of addresses generated in 2001 and 2002 and interfaces that show and compare the data from both databases.”  In Migration, she represented the Internet by allocating dots to the sites of a database, with different colors depending on the year of creation of these sites, and it is the only representation that allows to see changes over the year, to see the web “moving”,  whereas the other ones are static. But my favorite from the 5 is “Every“, which is really beautiful and gives access to all the websites from the database.

I love the way she describes the purpose of this piece of Net art: “When navigating the Web through the databases, via the five interfaces, one experiences a very different Web than when navigating it with the “road maps” provided by search engines and portals. Instead of advertisements, pornography, and pictures of people’s pets, this Web is an abundance of inaccessible information, undeveloped sites and cryptic messages intended for someone else. Search-engines and portals deliver only a thin slice of the Web to us, not the high-resolution image we sometimes think they do. The interfaces/visualizations are not maps of the Web but are, in some sense, the Web. They are super-realistic and yet function in ways images could not function in any other environment or time. They are a new kind of image of the Web, and they are a new kind of image. “

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 27th, 2007 at 6:47 am and is filed under Art, Internet/Technology.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.