[This interview with Simon Pope, Colin Green and Matthew Fuller of
I/O/D, conducted by Geert Lovink, first appeared on nettime. It was
given on occassion of the First International Browser Day
(www.waag.org), Amsterdam, April 17th, 1998. I/O/D are makers of the Web
Stalker, an internet browser.]
Geert Lovink: "Everybody is a browser designer"–but it is not
everyman's hobby to build one (yet). Where does the idea, to create
one's own browser, come from? Normally, designers are working with
content and have to make it look nice. But now there is the new
profession of the "interaction designer." Are you one of those? Are you
techno determinists, who believe that the shape of the interfaces is
determining the actual information?
Matthew Fuller: Hmm, this is one of those statements along the lines of
"Jederman ist ein kunstler." (Joseph Beuys) These statements sound
democratic, but actually have the subtext of meaning *Everyone wants to
be like me–the great man!*
No, not everyone is a browser designer for sure. And certainly it would
be unwise to want to be like us. People should actually have aspirations
right? The idea of making another piece of software to use the web with
came about for a few reasons. First of all, I/O/D had been working with
different ideas of interface and a general praxis around speculative
reinvention of the computer anyway. Secondly, we were bored by all the
hype. Thirdly, we knew it could be done, but didn't have the skills of
the knowledge to do it properly–so we had to do it.
As for being techno determinists? I guess we are interested in finding
this out. What comes into play using the web? The material on the URL
being used, which encompasses the programs, skills and materials used to
put it together as well as the specific items of data; then the actual
hard infrastructure–computers, servers, telephone lines, modems and of
course the software running on them, (in short, bandwidth
considerations); then the software being used to access the web–a great
big pile on top of which sits the Browser, terminal viewer or whatever.
All of these elements and how they mix determine to some extent the
nature of the interaction.
One of the things that drove us to make the Web Stalker was that we, and
pretty much everyone else, don't really use web-sites in the way that
they are supposed to be used. Whether it's switching off gifs or
blocking cookies or whatever there's an element of street knowledge that
you use to get to the stuff that you really want. We made the Web
Stalker to work in the same kind of way. It's designed to be predatory
and boredom-intolerant. At the same time though, we hope that as a piece
of *speculative software* it just encourages people to treat the net as
a space for re-invention.
Geert Lovink: Web Stalker is showing us the backstage of the browers.
Could you explain us how it actually works?
Simon Pope: the Web Stalker moves only within the limits of html space.
any co-conspirators needs to be fore-armed with at least one URL which
refers to an html document. give this to the "crawler," and the stalker
begins its process of parsing, hungrily searching for links to other
html resources. initiating a "map" window, opens a channel onto this
process, through which urls are graphically represented as circles and
links as lines. the stalker will thrive on known links and resources–as
long as each html document contains a link to another html document, the
stalker will live. pitch it into a netscape, microsoft, macromedia or
java-only space and it will soon perish.
Colin Green: When we began to use the stalker as our primary web-access
software, we became aware of the extent to which html has become a site
of commercial contention. Browsers made by the two best-know players
frame most peoples' experience of the web. This is a literal framing.
whatever happens within the window of explorer, for instance, is the
limit of possibility. HTML is, after-all, a mark-up language which
indicates structure and intention of a document.
Geert Lovink: but is the web stalker not also a bit protestant, in the
sense of anti-image and pro code?
Matthew Fuller: The Web Stalker establishes that there are other
potential cultures of use for the web. The aesthetic conventions of
current Browsers are based on the discipline of Human Computer Interface
Design. To describe the predelictions of this approach to interface you
only have to note that the default background colour in
page-construction programs is grey. Progress is marked by the
incremental increase of fake drop-shadow on windows. Here, the normal
user is only ever the normalised user. Time to mutate.
For us, software must also develop some kind of relationship to beauty.
This can in one sense be taken as something that only happens in the
eyes. But it is also something that happens at a level that is also
profoundly interwoven with politics in the development of these
potential cultures of use. It is in this sense that we call The Web
Stalker "speculative" software. It is not setting itself as a universal
device, a proprietary switching system for the general intelligence, but
a sensorium–a mode of sensing, knowing and doing on the web that makes
its propensities clear.
Rather than taking an ascetic view we see that a key problem with the
Browsers is that they don't allow the Spew to manifest itself *enough*.
This software is a call for the voluptuation of the nets and everything
they connect to. As the union leader Big Bill Heywood used to say,
stroking his belly and sucking on a tasty dog-shit-sized cigar:
Nothing's too good for the proletariat.
Geert Lovink: How do you see the Amsterdam effort of the "International
Browser Day" in all this?
Matthew Fuller: For us, the Browser Day is a very useful initiative.
Once the breach has been made, proving that the net can be used and
developed in ways largely at variance with the proprietary browsers and
the interests they maintain, the floodgates can *potentially* open. A
thousand different net sensoriums can be launched. The Browser Day is
important because it was done in a way that was at once informed by both
technique and theory without priviliging either and done in a populist
celebratory manner. It's not just done to force the didactic proof that
software can be *exciting* but also that people can make actual, rather
than virtual, reconfigurations of ways of seeing, knowing and doing.
