Gavin Baily, Tom Corby and Jonathan Mackenzie have been working together for over 10 years, through an art practice that explores the intersections of complex systems, technology and information.
Tom Corby, Die Text, 2005
die.txt is a bio-engineered text editor. As the user types, individual words spawn outgrowths of alternative meanings and definitions. These metonyms are sucked from Wordnet, a lexical reference system developed by Princeton University.
Using a metaphor derived from medical research into skin-cancer simulations, the letter forms are generated by 'cellular growth', each character having a particular cell-division encoding. The sentences of newly created metonyms grow 'cancerously' from cells in the original text.
Reconnoitre, 1997-1999
Reconnoitre was part of a series of works concerned with our experience of the network as a bizarre_scape; an environment with a high metabolism whose boundaries are continuously re-shaped; accreting and thickening under the influence of powerful social and commercial forces.
While Reconnoitre can be considered as a browser in that it allows the user to search for and access web sites, it is less concerned with the coherent display of information as with representing browsing as a behavioural activity.
Probably best described as a dysfunctional browser it seeks to enunciate our consumption of information as a journey of surprise, that seeks to reinstate the pleasure of browsing as technologically experienced dérive (drift) in its own right -an ambient grazing of text.
