In this lecture, Inge Hinterwaldner talks about the research behind the exhibition and highlights selected examples of browser art.

Choose your Filter: Web browsers are our gateways to the World Wide Web or Internet: They interpret the code of websites, display texts, images or videos and make it possible to use the internet in the first place. They have a decisive influence on how we experience this digital space and determine how we interact with the Internet.

Artistic - or creative - browsers do not necessarily follow the usual principles of commercial portals: User-friendliness, efficiency, high transmission speed and multifunctionality take a back seat in these alternative approaches. Such artistic applications have the potential to surprise us by presenting Internet structures in an unusual way and questioning the supposed neutrality of this important software tool.

It is precisely through the experience of such alternative interfaces that we become aware of how standardized and restrictive commercial browsers are today. But no matter which browser we use: Each comes with a set of conceptual filters that influence what we see, how we see it - and most importantly, what we don't see.

Further information: https://zkm.de/en/2025/02/choose-your-filter

Conversations on Art and Media is a new lecture series with guests from the extended fields of media art and media theory, jointly organized by members of the HfG Karlsruhe and the ZKM. In the summer semester 2025, the series will focus on unconventional concepts and materializations of the computer as well as alternative ways of dealing with it. In view of the quasi-monopoly of large tech companies and the power of default settings and standards, the lectures and discussions will pose questions such as: To what extent can computers look or function differently? How can computer (technologies) be reflected, perceived, used or changed differently?

Concept: Victor Fancelli Capdevila (HfG), Julia Ihls (HfG), Tina Lorenz (ZKM), Lea Luka Sikau (ZKM), Nina Zschocke (HfG) Design: Ewa Wasilewska Poster design: Eric Stelse, Leon Stark

Further dates, summer semester 2025: 19.06., 18:00, HfG Andrew Adamatzky (UWE Bristol): Computing with Unusual Substrates

26.06., 20:00, HfG Lichtbrücke Benoit Baudry (KTH Stockholm): Amplifying Diversity in Code and Execution

03.07., 18:00, HfG Lichtbrücke Joana Moll (KHM Cologne), Tatiana Bazzichelli (Disruption Network Lab)