Collage Machine: a direct manipulation agent of recombination for browsing the www.

Symposium:

• ISEA2000: 10th International Symposium on Electronic Art

• Andruid Kerne

• Tutorial Statement (‘Seminar’)

  CollageMachine is a direct manipulation agent of recombination. Dada artists, such as Duchamp’s and Ernst, and the composer John Cage, used structured chance procedures to create aesthetics assemblages. Their works create new meaning by re-contextualizing found objects.

  CollageMachine embodies this process of collage making. Starting from a set of URLs, or of search engine queries, the program crawls the web, downloading media. As users may be more interested in the constituent stuff which lies within documents, than in the documents per se, so CollageMachine offers browsing at this finer level of granularity: media elements. The media elements stream into a collage. A point and click, drag and drop, direct manipulation interface affords the user with the ability to rearrange the visualization. Based on the user’s expression through this interaction. CollageMachine reasons about her/his interests; the evolving model informs on-going choices of selection and placement.

Category:

• Demo or Tutorial