KARLSRUHE.- Web browsers define how the Internet is displayed to us users. This phenomenon also fascinated artists from early on. Since the 1990s, they have developed their own browsers to filter the data streams of the Internet from an artistic perspective thus creating new points of access to the web. The exhibition "Choose Your Filter!" looks back at 30 years of artistic browsers, and invites visitors to explore and try them out for themselves. The exhibition is based on two research projects on Internet art conducted by the Institute for History of Art and Architecture at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). Their artists and the technicians at the ZKM have succeeded in getting most of the browsers up and running again for the first time in many years. [ZKM | Karlsruhe, exhibition "Choose Your Filter! Browser Art since the Beginnings of the World Wide Web," 1.2.–24.8.25]

Web browsers determine what we see and what we don’t see on the Internet. Since the early days of the Internet, artists have developed their own browsers. These artistic browsers offer independent, often unconventional access to the World Wide Web.

The exhibition "Choose Your Filter!" shows how rich, wild, and playful the Internet can be when experienced through the eyes of artists. In one browser, we encounter a website as a 3D paradise scene; in a different browser, the same website is presented to us as a soundscape. This almost forgotten diversity of the Internet can be experienced in this exhibition. Visitors can explore the majority of the artistic browsers on display interactively to experience today’s Internet, but also a reconstructed Internet of yesteryear. At the same time, the exhibition asks how we users access the Internet today and to what extent this access is shaped by our contemporary web browsers.

A Collaboration between KIT and ZKM

The idea for the exhibition was developed in the context of the two research projects "Browser Art: Navigating with Style" (2019–2023) and "Coded Secrets: Artistic Interventions Hidden in the Digital Fabric" (2022–) conducted by the Institute for History of Art and Architecture at the KIT.

Numerous exhibited works were brought back to life for the first time in many years by the respective artists and technicians at the ZKM through reprogramming and painstaking restoration of historical software. As a result, many artistic browsers from all over the world that had been considered lost can now be seen and used again.

The exhibition features works by Gavin Baily / Tom Corby, Hernando Barragán, Simon Biggs, J. Brucker-Cohen, Christophe Bruno, Shane Cooper, Mark Daggett, Ted Davis, Andy Deck, Constant Dullaart, Entropy8Zuper! exonemo, Andrew Freeman / Jason Skeet, Jasmine Guffond, Alberto Harres / Daniel Howe / Helen Nissenbaum / Mushon Zer-Aviv, Melanie Hoff, I/O/D, JODI, Chino Kim, Tobias Leingruber, Peter Luining, Jonas Lund, Boris Müller, Tim Plaisted, re|thread, Rafaël Rozendaal, Jeffrey Shaw, Stanza, Thomson & Craighead, Waag Futurelab, and Maciej Wisniewski.

The exhibition is curated by Inge Hinterwaldner and Daniela Hönigsberg from KIT and Laura C. Schmidt from ZKM. Marc Schütze is responsible for the restoration of the artworks on display in collaboration with the ZKM technical team.