I/O/D unleash a new program that looks set to "re-shape the Internet". The Web Stalker is a new software application for reading and manipulating information on the most popular portion of the Internet - the World Wide Web. As 'Web Browsers' become increasingly more bloated and pointless, the Web Stalker - launched this month - gives users 'fast and dirty', 'high protein access' to this media.

After the uneasy peace in the 'Browser Wars', the Web Stalker is a dramatic aesthetic and technical intervention that takes the situation to boiling-point. Most artistic work on the web is channelled into merely providing content for web sites. These sites are bound by the conventions underlying the programming language (HTML) which describes and formats web pages.

Despite the usual atistic responses of deconstruction or incoherence and largely failed claims to 'interactivity', these conventions remain impervious. They therefore remain the most dominant aesthetic on the Internet.

The Web Stalker is the first internet application designed by artists. It is a unique example of the re-visualisation of data-space at a deep level. The Web Stalker uses the fact of machinic and interpersonal communication across the network, and the technological structure and functions of the network to radically amplify or reroute them - it's also an astoundingly good program.

The Web Stalker (in either PC or Mac format) is available to download for free at the below.

http://www.backspace.org/iod/