Abstract
During the last 30 years, a variety of Web browsers have been developed by software engineers as well as by artists. These applications all serve as entry points to the Web and shape the ways in which users interact. And yet, no study has so far been conducted to establish the relationships between these cross-domain developments. From the early days, the page metaphor provided a successful, initially even defining, conceptual model for presenting Web content in conventional browsers. Artists pursue diverging agendas, metaphors and spatial designs. They tend to abstain from mimicking the page and devote considerable attention to the visual, spatial and temporal configurations of their applications. Focusing specifically on these aspects, we compare f ive artists’ browsers both with each other and with a set of recurring spatial features in conventional browsers, e.g. “page” and “tab”, in order to distil implicit conceptions of the Internet, its users, and their opportunities-for-action. In these case studies (I/O/D’s Web Stalker, JODI’s .com.mx from their %WRONG Browser series, Craighead & Thompson’s e-poltergeist, Hernando Barragán & Andrés Burbano’s Hiperlook, and Jasmine Guffond’s Listening Back), we analyse and address the following questions: a) How are the web browsers designed spatially/visually/temporally? b) What actions result from this design? c) What user conceptions are deducible from the possible actions? d) What Internet conceptions follow from both? Finally, we include findings from browser usage studies to introduce further parameters that help to highlight the specificities of how Internet use and access were envisioned in the browsers. We thereby hope to contribute to art and visual history, interface and Internet studies.