Arts Online: Innovative Webmasters Chase Fame at Browserday
By MATTHEW MIRAPAUL
Jonah Brucker-Cohen doesn't surf the Net so much as he takes it for a spin. To visit a Web site, he types its address and watches as a blank page pops up on his monitor. Then he grabs the handle of a device connected to his computer and cranks it furiously, as if he were revving up a Model T. The more quickly he rotates the handle, the faster the page appears digitally on the screen. The system's benefits are that "you control your own bandwidth," Mr. Brucker-Cohen explained, referring to the size of the data-delivery pipeline, "and it increases your fitness."
Mr. Brucker-Cohen, an artist and a research fellow at New York University, demonstrated his Crank the Web project on Thursday during International Browserday, a design competition whose finals were held at Cooper Union in the East Village. Browserday allows college students to illustrate their visions of how people will interact with the Internet as it evolves. Although no one expects Mr. Brucker-Cohen's prototype to become a real product, it was clearly the crowd favorite and earned its maker the contest's top prize, a laptop computer that does not require bulging biceps to access the Internet.
This was the fourth annual Browserday and the first held in the United States. Mieke Gerritzen, 38, a graphic designer in Amsterdam, helped found the contest in 1998 to encourage students in the visual, performing and graphic arts to participate in the future of computing. Alternatives to Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator, the dominant Web-browsing programs, are just starting points for their musings.
Ultimately, Browserday, located at internationalbrowserday.com, is a sort of poetry slam for artistically inclined techies. Although the presentations, which range from vague lecturing to prototype demonstrations, are prepared in advance, they have the feel of free associations on a common theme. Contestants, who also face a three-minute time limit, must make an instant impact, much like a well-made Web page.
In addition to computer-generated images, the presentations by the competition's two dozen finalists included video art, a political manifesto and a dance choreographed via e-mail. There was also one outright spoof: the InterPet, an alternative Internet created to "solve problems as animals would." (Alas, time expired before its workings could be described.)
The technological entries ranged from the whimsical to the utterly pragmatic. In the former category were Mr. Brucker-Cohen's crank- driven Web browser and the Scrtch Machine, by Roel Wouters, a student at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam. Mr. Wouters's device applies to Web navigation the motions used by D.J.'s to scratch records. A user would spin a turntablelike mouse, for example, to fast-forward through a video clip.
But there were serious proposals as well. The contest's first runner-up was Active Cursor, by Koert van Mensvoort, another Sandberg student. He envisions software that would enable a cursor to change its movement as it encounters onscreen material. When, say, the cursor passes over a photograph of an icy surface, it slides rapidly. "He's giving volume and texture to the screen of the computer," said Paola Antonelli, curator of design at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan and one of the competition's judges.
Perhaps most provocative was Tap, by Mark Argo, a digital artist in California. He proposed a wearable device that would plug into a publicly accessible information source and display data in a style chosen by the wearer. Years from reality, it still appeals to the imagination: no more squinting at tiny, ornate script on a restaurant's menu; plug yourself into the restaurant's computer and, voil�, there is the information in big, blocky type.
With such a device, "you can carry your own environment with you," said Ken Perlin, director of N.Y.U.'s Multimedia Laboratory and another Browserday judge. "It really reconceptualizes what the Web is. It becomes a personal thing. It's an alternative to the tyranny of walking up to a screen and being stuck with what's there."
"Being stuck with what's there" is what many of the competing artists saw as the obstacle to overcome. It's also the challenge for those working in the digital realm. In 1997 I/O/D, a London-based trio, developed the Web Stalker, widely considered the first artist-made Web browser. Available at bak.spc.org/iod, it creates a three-dimensional map of the connections between Web sites. More recently Maciej Wisniewski, a New York artist, produced his own alternative Web browser, Netomat, which retrieves Internet text and images and sends them floating across the screen. The program, which is at netomat.net, can also be seen in the "Data Dynamics" exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
"Browsers are important because they affect our world," said Alex Galloway, director of technology for Rhizome.org, a digital-art resource. "They sculpt the data we read every day. Sculpture has always been part of art-making, so the move into software art makes a lot of sense to me."
At Browserday, however, few of the presentations involved the basic browser. Has its battleship-gray frame become so pervasive that it seems invisible? "It's not about the browser anymore," said Carl Goodman, the curator of digital media at the American Museum of the Moving Image. "It's about interacting with information and communicating with people over the Internet." Introducing aesthetic elements to those activities makes them more appealing, he said.
There was no denying the visual allure of many of the Browserday presentations, which reflected their creators' strong graphic-design backgrounds. Indra, a prototype for a search engine that displays results as a honeycomb of related findings, is far snazzier-looking than Yahoo! or the bare-bones Google.
Oddly, several presentations involved themes frequently explored in science fiction or already in development in media laboratories, like wearable computers. This trend may indicate that some of the contestants need to spend less time at the keyboard and more in the real world.
Ms. Gerritzen acknowledged that the presentations were not as theatrical as those at the earlier competitions held in Europe, but she said she intended to continue to present Browserday in the United States. "It's important that people get more freedom to design," she said. Otherwise, she added, "the world is going to be more ugly, and more the same, every day."
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