|
After creating Internet projects that involved active and conscious participation (Handshake in 1993-94 and Even a Stopped Clock Tells the Right Time Twice a Day in 1996), Blank and Jerron have now conceived a new project that further harnesses the power of the computer and the network to which it is attached. In Without addresses, visitors to the website acquire no new knowledge of the site’s overall structure. They leave traces that expand into paths and produce routes. They inscribe their presence on the map. The structure is generated by the visitors’ passage. This self-writing website has no addresses, no index. Concretely, the website activates two applications alongside the document being opened. The first application opens a Simple Text input field in a separate window. The visitor is prompted by the words: "Tell me who you are." Here the visitor has an opportunity to begin the inscription procedure. The entered text is used as a search string for an on-line search of the Internet. An individual HTML page is generated on the basis of the findings of this search. The visitor has now left behind a trace in Without addresses. The results of this search are displayed in handwritten characters, images in gray tones. The second application generates a map on the basis of the HTML documents, showing them as dots on the map. The visitors’ HTML pages are arranged on the map in chronological sequence. The visitor can select dots to view previously generated pages. This movement produces routes or connections between the dots. Only then does a structure emerge. The structure is expanded in real time and the chosen route is visualized. The visitor moves through the website by means of the map. Made up of nodes and interconnections, the two-dimensional map is the only agency of orientation within the virtual space of Without addresses. According to Roland Barthes in his text on orientation in Tokyo, visiting that city for the first time means beginning to write it. Addresses do not exist in Tokyo. Consequently, visual experience - as opposed to conventional representation - becomes a decisive element in orientation. To find one’s way is to move. Movement gives rise to path configurations. The systems of routes which interest Blank and Jeron are unplanned two-dimensional structures that inscribe themselves on an immaterial surface. No superordinate routing system exists to point the visitors in the desired direction. Thus they use the computing and directive power of the machine to demonstrate to visitors the degree to which it is up to them to generate the environment within which they move. |