With i/o/d4 The Webstalker, they attempt to revisualise dataspace on a deep level, to restructure the html data stream and seduce it into behaving differently. Webstalker opens a new space of possibility.

Programmed in Director, Webstalker reads html data but proceeds to depict on screen not the information, as a normal browser would, but the information's structure. It follows the links that lead from a Web page and renders them graphically. Each ball in the graphic stands for a separate Web page; each line is a connection, a link, between pages. The graphic gives a two-dimensional map of the structure of a Web site, or rather of a small piece of the Web - for it doesn't bother with the virtually drawn ‘borders’ of a domain name. Webstalker finds a link to the outside as easily as an internal one.

Webstalker is an aesthetic project. It is a metabrowser, a piece of ‘radical software’ made to demonstrate how limited existing browsers are. It has minimal use value, but it shows anyone who would make art for Netscape or Explorer that they must reconcile themselves to an existing concept at the start.

Webstalker is not a scientific instrument for analysing linking behaviour and Web site structure, though you would be inclined to think it would be useful for that. But it lacks a number of the necessary qualities. The maps generated by Webstalker do not indicate the direction of the links. While Webstalker is busy following links, that direction can be roughly followed on the screen (as long as the picture is not composed too quickly), but the stationary map gives no definite answer. Nor is there any indication of the links' content. A scientific instrument for analysing sites would absolutely have to be able to offer both. Webstalker is also not accurate enough; it does not find Java-scripted links, for example.

The infographics that accompany some of the articles in this issue are neither analyses nor pure illustrations. For the articles a Web page was sought that was relevant to the subject. The url of that page was opened in Webstalker. The result is a map, a spatial representation, in which that page’s embedment in the network can be read. It roughly indicates the page’s place, its most direct context on the www. This representation is sharpened somewhat by the recording of three moments in the Webstalker’s searching, which gives an idea of the passage of time.