Crawlers

Nowadays, much of the internet is explored not by humans, but by machines. Invisible programs known as crawlers move through websites, following links, reading pages, and collecting information. They are fundamental to how the internet is indexed, organized, and increasingly used as a source of material for artificial intelligence. Yet, despite their constant activity, we rarely encounter these machines or consider their behavior. In Crawlers, Slava gives these invisible processes a body, a voice, and a habitat, transforming the automated extraction of information into a living, playful, and occasionally chaotic experience. Each artwork takes the form of a unique digital creature inspired by the anatomy and movement of spiders, centipedes, and other crawling organisms. These creatures inhabit an interactive website modeled after the familiar structure of Wikipedia, a space traditionally associated with the organization and accumulation of human knowledge. Released from its enclosure, each crawler begins exploring the page, responding to words, images, and hyperlinks as the viewer guides its movement through the browser. Some move slowly and methodically, others race across the screen. Some connect words through intricate webs of relationships, while others scatter paragraphs into fragmented arrangements. Their movements also produce sound, turning the act of gathering information into an improvised musical performance. Each crawler has its own visual and sonic behavior, making the website both an ecosystem and an instrument. As the creatures explore, the information they encounter becomes material for generating new content, which accumulates beneath the original page. Scrolling reveals further text to be explored, processed, and transformed, creating a potentially endless cycle in which information produces more information. The distinction between reading and writing begins to dissolve. What initially appears to be an encyclopedia gradually becomes an unstable, self-generating archive, where knowledge is no longer simply preserved but continually reorganized and expanded through computational processes. In this fun project, Slava does more than simply visualizing data scraping, Crawlers proposes an ecology of information, one in which machines inhabit, consume, transform, and reproduce the material of the internet. By borrowing the language of biology, we see systems not as abstract algorithms but as strange organisms with their own behaviors and relationships to knowledge. Their movements suggest curiosity, appetite, repetition, and even creativity. The work offers a new encounter with one of the central transformations of internet culture: the shift from a web primarily written and read by humans to one increasingly traversed, interpreted, and reproduced by machines. Artist Statement: Crawlers is a kinetic, interactive work with feedback loops operating on multiple levels. Its motion system combines algorithmic and nature-inspired distributed models, inviting viewers to explore the underlying mechanisms. Its visual language reflects a similar balance: points, squares, and circles combine rigid technical expression with dynamic, lifelike movement. Interaction with the page attempts to blur the boundaries between the artwork and the viewer, while also reflecting on contemporary questions surrounding web crawlers, bots, and data collection. Page generation introduces a simple generative system, a stripped-down LLM predictor, offering viewers an opportunity to experience machine learning at its core. In the age of AI agents, we increasingly find ourselves personifying probabilistic algorithms. The work invites us to reflect on this tendency and consider deeper questions about what is alive, what is not, and what we are. How are we different from machines? References [1] Ijspeert, A. J., Crespi, A., Ryczko, D., and Cabelguen, J.-M. (2007). From swimming to walking with a salamander robot driven by a spinal cord model. Science, 315(5817), 1416–1420. [2] Owaki, D., Goda, M., Miyazawa, S., and Ishiguro, A. (2017). A minimal model describing hexapedal interlimb coordination: The Tegotae-based approach. Frontiers in Neurorobotics, 11, 29.