ISEA2008 Juried Exhibition
Exodus
Metahaven (Netherlands/Belgium) & Tsila Hassine (Israel)
Collaborating with: Lab for Media Search
Search engines are now the biggest online businesses of all. While they purport to treat all data without discrimination, their power to shape the way we perceive the internet positions them on the cutting edge of debates about privatizing the web and ‘net neutrality’ (the principle whereby all networks are treated equally). Meanwhile, the nature of ‘distance’ between places, people and products has been both narrowed and expanded in the virtual realm. Virtual proximity enables the formation of communities which gain in consistency and presence. Simultaneously, it is precisely the confirmative, self-referential, behaviour of "friends" that blurs the borders between public spheres. Exodus proposes new paradigms for ‘search’ on the internet, creating a set of separate but interdependent algorithms to reveal the structural properties of web content. Users can observe the progress of these mechanisms via projected visualisations of these properties.
Metahaven (Amsterdam and Brussels) is a design research collective founded in 2006, it consists of Vinca Kruk, Daniel van der Velden and Gon Zifroni. Their work connects graphic design and architecture, and is concerned with their political and ideological interdependencies. For Exodus they will be collaborating with Tsila Hassine (Israel) a media artist and web-programmer.
