Egosurf Suite (2008)

a mapping, a software, a data visualization, a placement

URL color field painting

Overview

In referring to The Third Memory, a piece by Pierre Huyghe, Tom McDonough stated that "it is rather the ever-increasing conscription of the subject by the mechanisims of that culture, the culmination of more than a half-century of attempts to colonize everyday life down to its most minute aspects." These minute details get erased because of the mechanisms of our culture, like our adoption of the internet as a democratic sphere where all have equal validity.

In his book Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means, Albert-Laszlo Barabasi discusses how the development of the internet as a non-hub based defense structure has yielded a power law field where major players in the web environment still maintain a power dominance of links. Google and Apple, Inc., for example, retain power because so many other webpages have democratically linked to their URLs. While the individual links of the internet have been built democratically, the form that the overall structure has taken is anything but. These links are meaningful because the search algorithms used by Google, Yahoo and others preemptively hold the bias that the more links a site retains flowing to it equates to a more relevant match to the inquiry.

Welcome screen

Our individual presence in the web is minute, mostly because of the choices made by a few individuals who retain the power hubs. The ego-surf software allows us to examine our presence in the massive structure the internet has become through the paradigms chosen by the Google corporation. To use the software, you enter your personal URL and a keyword how you believe your site functions. For example, populate the text boxes: "art.waynemadsen.com" and "post-modern theory". What results is a series of colors which will fill the screen. Each square represents one URL which the Google search engine believes is a relevant match to the keyword search. If your site is among the possible responses, it will remain lit. If not, it will disappear with the rest.

When the page is done populating, you may scroll over the URL squares to see which websites are, according to Google, relevant. To return to the main menu, click to the far right or the very bottom of the screen. When you wish to exit the program, just hit escape while in the welcome screen.

Download:
>>executable jar file
>>open java code

Keywords: power dynamics, software, google, internet presence

Important links: >>>here, >>here and here

>>www.waynemadsen.com<<