Search Engine / Engine Search  
About the interactive installation Search Engine; 
by Shirley Shor & Aviv Eyal, 1998

Human history can be studied (and read) through its Search Engines. A Search Engine reflects a culture's Zeitgeist. It is an institution and a mechanism that answer our need to organize, filter and catalog existing known human knowledge. Every era creates and uses Search Engines - From the Noah's Ark, through the bookcase, the cabin, the church, the catalog, the archive, the museum, the encyclopedia, the dictionary, all the way to the Tele-Vision and the Internet. As the amount of Information (historic knowledge) grows, so does the need for more sophisticated mechanisms to dominate it, to act within it, to navigate it. These mechanisms require an adequate infrastructure upon which a search is possible. Traditional Search Engines usually do not initiate, but rather follow technological advances, but they play an important role in the technological arena since they implement technology and encourage its development.

The Internet Search Engines phenomena present a new evolutionary stage in the history of cybernetics (The science Information manipulation , organization and governance). When we think the Internet as the ultimate text, the global book, the universal encyclopedia, we perceive that the engine function as a master index and as the interface through which we can navigate information islands. The Internet Search Engine reflect a post-informational culture: a bit production era in which bits can be created and sustained anywhere and anytime. These Engines allow us to reorganize digitized information in new, unexpected and personal ways. This means that Engines are capable of expanding our conceptual reception and acceptance field. Engines allow us to re-map and reconfigure the info-space through what we can call an art of cross-reference, an art of hybridization. This capability allows new and unexpected dimensions to appear. We therefore conclude that a Search Engine is not just a tool of worldly navigation but it also functions as a dynamic environment that is built in real time from its user's navigational browsing paths.

The "Search Engine" physical computing art installation exposes the digital search engine mechanisms and the practices of its usage by posing it as a focal subject for observation and research. The art piece produces a network of realized communication relations which is created between two custom search engine systems. The engines relate, contain and criticize each other in a rotational manner. The work deals with the economics of phrases and their concatenation in an exhibition space that is turned by the piece into a hybrid environment (part physical part virtual). Above all, the "Search Engine" is an interactive installation that deals with the relation between man and machine in the post-informational era.

Two pedestals are situated in the center of the darkened exhibition space. Two Personal Computer systems are facing each other, each one on a different pedestal. Each PC is connected through the telephone system to the Internet and hosts a custom Internet search engine software that was developed especially for the installation by its artists. The computers are involved in an audio and visual dialog. The dialog is based upon mutual information retrieval requests and upon information presentation by the computers. Each computer, in its turn, requests the other one to search the Internet for a certain phrase. The computer that got the request operates its search engine software and retrieves number of relevant World Wide Web sites which contain this phrase. The computer that initiated the request, now chooses one of these sites. The chosen site appears on the PC monitor and is also projected using head-projectors on the exhibition space wall. The next round of activity will be based on one of the projected site's content: The custom software picks the search phrase from the projected site text. The requests are performed by voicing English language audio commands, using Text to Speech technology, speech recognition technology, computer speakers and microphones. The computers exchange roles and repeat their dialog ad infinitum. The overall achieved effect is of an ever-changing colorful Placate, that is made out of graphical Internet web sites, spoken words and numbers.

The dialog is almost fully autonomic - the computers operate each other without interactive human assistance. However, the installation audience is encouraged to interact and to interfere with the installation. It can affect and divert the displayed sites by intentionally or unintentionally saying words that are intercepted by the installation microphones and software. These words can have precedence over the digitally produced voices. In this aspect, the viewers are turned into participant computer viruses that affect the 'normal', the 'planned' computerized activity.

The work hints on the possibility of using concepts such as Software and the Internet in physical art installations without forcing the viewer to operate as a 'computer user' (leaning in-front of a monitor, hands tied to mouse or keyboard) in the gallery space. It exposes the esthetic dimension of the World Wide Web since it subverts the search operation and the found pages otherwise 'normal' practical usage. "Search Engine" demonstrates how the Personal Computer tool and the very personal experience of web browsing can be manipulated to become a group activity.

"Search Engine" gives precedence to Speech. The act of speaking is the physical act of communication. The bodily part of language which is identified with individualism. It is direct, personal and convenient. The human speaker is allowed to take over the situation - to take the current installation phrase and to concatenate it. Like in daily human activity, the word is turned into a "thing" in the world, an action. The phrase acts inside a field of language systems: an appropriation or re-appropriation of language through its speakers. It founds a present relative to a moment and to a place. It poses a contract with the addressee (be it man or machine).

Each phrase leads to the occurrence of a chain of actions. A spoken word is encoded to a code stream. It disintegrates to a multitude of appearances, to numerous sites that contain it. Every phrase turns into a crossing, a place which occupies space in countless maps, images and networks. A place that reminds us of the concept of the modern Airport - A crossing from place to place. Search Engine is the Passport, the Visa that allows you to leave and to connect into those new other spaces. The Search Engine concept fully explains the leap from one discourse to another . The leap becomes a part of the Post-Modern condition.