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Browser Talk offers the first substantial oral history of browser art, tracing how artists, programmers, and experimental media practitioners transformed the web browser from a functional interface into a site of aesthetic, conceptual, and political experimentation.
Developed through the research project Browser Art: Navigating with Style (2019–2023), the book brings together interviews with many key figures in the field to reconstruct the histories, technical conditions, and artistic ambitions that shaped browser-based art practices from the early years of the web to the present. Through conversations, archival material, and critical reflection, the collection reveals how artists used browsers not simply as tools for accessing the internet, but as creative media capable of challenging conventions of navigation, authorship, visibility, software design, and user experience.
Positioning browser art within broader histories of internet culture, software art, and digital aesthetics, Browser Talk addresses a significant gap in media art scholarship. The book explores how browser-based artworks intersect with questions of interface politics, technological experimentation, preservation, network culture, and the changing relationship between users and online systems. At the same time, its oral-history approach preserves forms of technical and artistic knowledge that have often remained fragmented, ephemeral, or historically overlooked, surviving in many cases only through screenshots, scattered archives, and partial documentation.
The book demonstrates that browser art is not simply a marginal chapter in internet history, but a historically fragile and insufficiently archived field whose artistic, technical, and conceptual significance demands reconstruction and preservation.
Richly illustrated and shaped by experimental editorial and visual strategies, the collection reflects the innovative spirit of the works it documents while remaining accessible to readers across disciplines. Alongside the interviews, the volume includes artist biographies, visual documentation, glossaries, and editorial reflections that further illuminate the technological, cultural, and conceptual ecosystems surrounding browser art.
Combining artistic testimony, historical reconstruction, and critical analysis, Browser Talk provides a major contribution to contemporary discussions of digital art, software culture, internet history, and media archaeology. In doing so, it demonstrates that browser art is not simply a marginal chapter in internet history, but a historically fragile and insufficiently archived field whose artistic, technical, and conceptual significance demands reconstruction and preservation.
The book will be essential reading for scholars and students of media art, digital culture, internet studies, software studies, curatorial practice, and contemporary art, as well as for artists, technologists, and readers interested in the cultural histories of the web.
Browser Talk: An Oral History of Browser Art offers compelling insight into how artists use and exploit the unique features of web browsers to create powerful aesthetic, cultural, and political expressions. Through insightful interviews and thick descriptions, this book unravels the different layers of how the browser shapes and connects digital and physical experiences, highlighting its impact on society. Essential reading for artists, technologists, and cultural thinkers alike, it serves as a critical guide for those eager to forge new paths in the ever-evolving digital landscape.
– Annet Dekker, University of Amsterdam
Inge Hinterwaldner is an art historian and professor at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy. Her research interests include art and technology, visual STS, tectonics of programmed art, image and model theory, expressiveness of fluid dynamics, and the interdependence between the arts and the sciences since the 19th century.
Daniela Hönigsberg is an art historian specializing in computer-based artworks. Her work combines art historical analysis with technical investigation, focusing on software behavior, contingency, and digital obsolescence, and includes the development of research tools at the intersection of art history, digital humanities, and computer science.
Ten Deep Dives into the Pasts and Futures of Coded Art: An Introduction
Inge Hinterwaldner and Daniela Hönigsberg
1. The Web Stalker
‘Our Approach Was to Let You in Through the Back Door’
Matthew Fuller and Simon Pope / I/O/D
2. DISCODER
‘The Concept Is a Psychedelic Browser: A Tool to Mix Up a Brain’
Kensuke Sembo and Yae Akaiwa / exonemo
3. Human Browser
‘It Was Very Important That You Plug a Human Being to This Dispositive and It Gets Animated. It Was Like a Frankenstein’
Christophe Bruno
4. Browser Gestures
‘The Browser Is Probably the Most Used Application Ever’
Mark Daggett
5. Hiperlook
‘This Is the Age of Browsers. Browsers for Everything’
Andrés Burbano and Hernando Baragán
6. e-poltergeist
‘It Was Still a New Idea That People Would Actually Try to Derive a Conversation from the Browser’
Alison Craighead and Jon Thomson / Thomson & Craighead
7. Listening Back
‘They Say “It’s Really Interesting, but You Wouldn’t Want to Have It on for Too Long”’
Jasmine Guffond
8. Real Time Contextual Art Generator
‘I Wanted to Focus on How to Algorithmically Generate Good Output All the Time’
Don Relyea
9. eden.garden
‘To Make a Place Out of a Webpage Was Extremely in Line with What We Felt’
Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn / Entropy8Zuper!
10. <earshot>
‘It Was Important to Have a Sense That Things Didn’t Have to Be the Way They Were’
Andy Freeman and Jason Skeet
Coding Conversations: The Editing Process from Spoken Word to Structured Text
Daniela Hönigsberg and Inge Hinterwaldner
Biographies
Glossary