Crank the Web

Crank the Web

Production country: 
us
Edition: 
2002
Format: 
installation
Crank the Web by Jonah Bruckner-Cohen. Scan from the transmediale.02 program booklet.

Crank the Web is a browser enabling the visitor to manipulate the loading speed of a website manually, by cranking a handle. The visitor indicates the name of a website which he desires to visit and then begins to crank: the page is loaded, bit by bit, and copy and images appear in the browser-window, depending on the cranking speed. The idea behind Crank the Web is to connect old-fashioned forms of automatisation with the new, digital telecommunication technology. The combination of such a simple and well-known tool as the crank with contemporary technology is an effort to make hidden or usually unrecognised computer actions more transparent. Brucker-Cohen’s work Crank the Web uses a very direct language actually in tune with the practice-oriented design-approach used by the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), the European branch institute of which Brucker-Cohen currently works and researches for. But already before his work for the MIT Brucker-Cohen had begun with translating regular, graphics-based interfaces into physical interfaces. Maybe it is exactly this no-nonsense clarity and self­contentedness of this work which renders it so accesible, maybe also getting in the way of the inherent reflection on the global differences in access to this new technological equipment and a speedy internet connection. Brucker turns the demand for free and unlimited access for everybody into an object relating the individually available band­width with physical strength as opposed to personal wealth.

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