Ursula Endlicher: Website Impersonations: The Ten Most Visited

Website Impersonations: The Ten Most Visited -- 06/10/06

Website Impersonations: The Ten most Visited #9 - www.howstuffworks.com
The first performance in the series took place on June 10, 2006. I enacted the Website "www.howstuffworks.com", which was rank #9 in the popularity ranking. As I am using different ranking methods, one of them is to search for "href" on google, which returned a list, on which howstuffworks made place nine.
The performance consisted of a stage set-up, representing the overall theme of the website; further a projection, using the actual life stream of the current html structure of the site displaying the matching movements from the library. This gave the character the instruction of how to move. This humanoid website was all dressed up, resembling the logo (with a twist) of each site.

As it turned out, the audience was eager to participate -- several audience members started to join in -- this became part of the future pieces.

Stream
Technical Background: For the performance I set up a php-request that went out onto "howstuffworks.com" and returned their current html structure to my program. Using this structure the program was looking for matching tags in the html-movement-library, and displayed the corresponding movement suggestions from each tag category. Within each category it was picking a file randomly, which then gave me a performance task to do. Generally, in the performances I never know which tag will come next, this is up to the way the website is scripted that day.