Bradley Carter Artist |
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Strike! While they are still unable to see us
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The ArtBrowser "Welcome. ArtBrowser is your portal to the largest collection of visual art in the known universe. ArtBrowser's goal is merely to frame art as the artist made it, not to interact with that art. Let go of your own preconceptions and witness some of the most inventive and dynamic art ever made..." -Intro page to the ArtBrowser The ArtBrowser project was designed to "frame" a web-surfer's experience in a new light. ArtBrowser is a Mac application that is essentially a web browser, except that the user has no ability to control their surfing other than the control offered to them by links built into the sites they are viewing. In other words, there is not a "back" button, no "forward" button, no "reload," no "history", and not even an address bar in which to enter a url. The program is reduced to a simple frame that is a window to whatever website the user is viewing. The ArtBrowser Intro Page offers a single link: "View Exhibition Catalog." When clicked, this link takes the user to www.google.com to begin their art-viewing experience. What follows is a new internet journey. The user is forced to navigate limited to the path each website's authors decided to create according to the links offered in the site. It is a journey that is destined to end once the user reaches a page that offers no links to other pages. From here the user is forced to exit ArtBrowser, restart it, and begin at the exhibition catalog again. It will be a frustrating experience if the user is trying to utilize ArtBrowser as an efficient tool merely to "get from a to b," consume information, or to make social transactions... as browsers are most commonly used. ArtBrowser is best appreciated as a portal to view websites as dynamic and interactive drawings that have been designed as experiential art. If we use the definition of drawing as "a mark that transforms a ground," the internet really is a treasure trove of beautiful drawings. ArtBrowser gives users permission to view the internet this way and gives artists the permission to create this way. |
