Surface Browser

‘We witness the advent of the number. It comes along with democracy, the large city, administrations, cybernetics. It is a flexible and continuous mass, woven tight like a fabric with neither rips nor darned patches, a multitude of quantified heroes who lose names and faces as they become the ciphered river of the streets, a mobile language of computations and rationalities that belong to no one.’ (1)
Michel de Certeau

Today millions of people across the globe traverse the virtual space of the internet. As an operational system it is one of the most utilised tools of communication. The language of the World Wide Web is complex and layered, constantly mutating into unique systems and structures, the absence of rules binding it to an amorphous understanding of space and time. Internet browsers such as Google™, have become essential links placed on desktops, acting as a doorway to the intricacies of the web, travelling if you like, down the various paths and codes that enable our questions to be miraculously explored. Internet browsers behave as portals to virtual space, embedded in an intricate matrix of language and numbers.

French theorist Michel de Certeau was one of the first in the early 1980s to philosophise the domestic interactions with the everyday in a post industrialised world of mass media and technology. His conception of human behaviour is made up of users or consumers of operational systems such as television, urban development or commerce, highlighting the dominant ways with which these forces shape, support and represent the construct by which we understand meaning. De Certeau’s examination of methods of operating – speech, walking, reading, sleeping, cooking – illustrates these acts are undertaken with the subliminal presence of history, memory and custom. The visual journey of popular culture through advertising, newspapers, television or the internet is the vehicle through which the act of the reader/user becomes the author/controller.

Tim Plaisted’s ‘Surface Browser’ is an experimental browser that changes the experience of the interface of the web. The user is confronted by a projected image of a tube-like vortex. Standing by a keyboard, the participant enters a web link or query which becomes a page that moves across the surface of the tube. ‘Surface Browser’ pulls images from its search, displaying them as a kind of skin to a three dimensional object. This object dives through the pathways of the Web, with speed and direction governed by the use of a joystick console. ‘Surface Browser’ reveals the results of the query through this tube, which randomly stops in a black weightless space of floating images. These are entry points to the labyrinthine matrix of the Web, acting as navigating doorways or hyperlinks for the user. Plaisted explains:

‘This is not a case of creating independent virtual 3D worlds but about remapping the existing visual aspect of the internet into an environment that can be entered and traversed. In this way, the solids representing pages can be seen as a way to give volume back to the millions of body images which make up so much of internet network traffic.’ (2)

Extending the act of looking is a fundamental characteristic that has been explored in the realm of art for centuries. Acknowledging the primary influence of light on perceptions of reality during prehistoric times created a three dimensional understanding of our physical surroundings, which in turn was reflected in visual likenesses, whether through painting, sculpture or photography. The advent of the technological age has been equally influential in manipulating our sense of time and we are now able to cross hemispheres in 24 hours and send emails across the globe in seconds. With this derangement of time comes a rupture in our understanding of space. The Web’s ability to act as an encyclopaedia of limitless options is commonly experienced as navigating aggregate data on a flat text screen. Rather than attempting to provide an alternate functional paradigm to navigate net data / space / time, Plaisted interprets the cumulative experience of traversing this space as ‘a deluge of images flowing into viewer perception.’ (3)

Browser intervention is a recent exploration in new media art, one that Plaisted has entered from the perspective of engagement with visual social culture. Much of Plaisted’s earlier work such as ‘24hr Coverage’ interrogated the simulated process of communicated reality. In ‘24hr Coverage’, TV news broadcasts appear as if the pause button is in slow gear. A newsreader is shown as if in a moment of repeated distress, a barely audible stammer issued from her lips as her actions are drawn out on screen. The absence of content is highlighted yet we understand the image as a vehicle through which information is divulged. Plaisted questions how decisions can be informed if they are ‘..made in terms of a society’s response to the events of the day without full participation of the public in an in-depth debate’. (4) His initial interest in digital/interactive media is grounded in a determination to explore its affects on users through interaction.

The interplay of the Web could be analogous to the act of walking the streets of the post-modern metropolis. De Certeau comments that it is the people who traverse the city, creating networks and intersecting writings that challenge and irrevocably alter the imaginary totalisation of the space of the city. Internet browsers could correspond to the grid of a city in that they attempt to control and designate space for particular usage. In much the same way that a walker will choose their winding path consuming the visual signs of the street, Plaisted’s ‘Surface Browser’ seeks to illustrate the hidden space of the internet, giving the anonymous user an opportunity to experience the optical voyage of a query.

Zoe Butt.
Curatorial Assistant, Contemporary Asian Art
Queensland Art Gallery

1. De Certau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. University of California Press, California, 1984, opening preface.
2. Artist statement http://www.boxc.net/surfacebrowser.html (downloaded 20.06.03).
3. Ibid.
4. Angguish, Dallas. ‘Monster 24 Hour Coverage’. Unpublished article, 2001.