2004 Rockefeller New Media Foundation Proposal

Abstract

The Infome Imager is a software for creating visualizations of the World Wide Web. The software allows the user to create "crawlers" (software robots, which could be thought of as automated Web browsers) that gather data from the Web, and it provides methods for visualizing the collected data. Some of the functionality of the Infome Imager software is similar to a search engine such as Google, but with some significant differences. Those differences shifts the software's functionality from being merely a tool for finding information on the Web to an art project which is generating new understandings of the Web. The lnfome lmager crawler collects "behind the scenes" data such as the length of a page, when a page was created, what network the page resides on, the colors used in a page and other design elements of a page etc. It scratches on the surface and glances down into the subconscious of the Web in hopes to reveal its inherent structure, in order to create new understandings of its technical, aesthetic and political functionalities.