8.12.1 For more reasons than one, the digital art world has not produced much in the world of agents on the net. There is one recent example, however, that should be mentioned‹WebStalker designed by a British Design group called I/O/D. True to a conceptual art tradition, it has a intellectual subtext and abstract interface that provides the user an entirely different view of the Web. The user opens a WebStalker document as a blank screen and then customises windows to perform different functions: a crawler parses a Web document and a map function creates a local dynamic map that uses circles and lines to represent URLs and links. It is basically text and does not use any graphics. Mathew Fuller explains, "A lot of the working capabilities within the [standard commercial] browser have been determined by the needs of advertisers, corporation, and so on, rather than experimentation with the format of the Web. So much of the visuals on the Web are just noise-ad banners and eye candy-we wanted to give people accesss to the most important information, which right now are words." (Brown, 1997, Website) [9]

8.12.2 The Information Personae is also inspired by the need to break out of the static window and offer a more flexible interface. It came out of a need to create work that simply could not have been realised with the existing agent softwares. But, it also turned out to be much larger than an art project and became an interdisciplinary research project that will ultimately result in many applications, primarily dedicated to fostering creative communities on the net and providing a multi-agent flexible tool that can be used by other artists as well. But let me step back again and give a bit of background on the evolution of the idea for the Information Personae. [top] Notes:

9. BROWN, Janelle. 1997. "Culture News from Wired News: Experimental Browser Maps Web's Words." www.backspace.org/iod/Wired01text.html More on WebStalker can be found on the I/O/D site: www.backspace.org/iod/IOD1.html