[spectre] Project: Universal Digest Machine

[Marius Watz]

-- Marius Watz: Universal Digest Machine
-- 7.2 - 31.4, Solvberget Kunstforening, Stavanger
-- Part of the exhibition "My Language"
-- http://spider.unlekker.net


A trip through the hyperuniverse of the World Wide Web on full 
autopilot: The Universal Digest Machine is an installation featuring a 
web spider that crawls the net, digesting web pages and outputting a 
brief analysis of their contents. The display unit is an industrial 
thermal printer mounted on a plinth. For every page visited by the 
spider, a receipt is printed, falling on the floor unless taken by a 
visitor. The receipts become a sprawling heap of intriguing but 
ultimately incomprehensible artifacts, obviously representing 
information but no longer in a human-readable form.

Internet space is much like the physical universe - greater than any 
single person could comprehend or personally navigate. Since the spider 
is indiscriminate about the links it follows, it ends up in places most 
human users would never reach. As it does so it reveals a Terra 
Incognita of obscure web sites, giving equal space to Microsoft white 
papers, Disney collectibles and scat fetishism. Just as antique maps 
would be marked with dragons and fantastic monsters where the 
cartographers' knowledge of the world ended, there may well be terrible 
and wonderful things lurking on the web just outside of reach.


-- The project can be seen online at http://spider.unlekker.net
-- Marius Watz
-- http://www.unlekker.net/
-- http://www.evolutionzone.com/