The World Wide Web offers the observer an undreamt-of source of possibilities to follow a thread of cobweb far away within fractions of a second, to discover more and different things than what he was actually looking for, to decide where to go, to change direction, to wander around, or more often, to get lost in a virtual maze. Many ways are dead ends, leading to nowhere.
aMAZEing web is a metaphor on the inability to find one's way around on this network with its uncounted junctions, names at first glance, finally revealing their contents once the links have been followed.
The observer gradually learns how to navigate through this web of unknowns, to dwell on a subject or to move on, without even knowing the actual correlations between the images, seemingly related in a multi-dimensional space of attributes.
Guided by the selection of a spot on the image, the observer's expression of will,
and by chance aMAZEing web leads to a microcosm of
images and thoughts, of the concrete and abstraction, of beauty and ugliness,
and tempts the observer to get lost and find back, to experience and to aMAZE.
aMAZEing web is not limited to a single computer. Instead the concept lends itself to the distribution of documents as well as to the distributed evaluation of attributes.
The current collection of images is just a small set from various sources all over the world,
placed on a single computer for reasons of simplicity.
aMAZEing web requires a graphical browser supporting imagemaps.
aMAZEing web, © 1995 Klaus Johannes Rusch.
Prix Ars Electronica 1995