"We tried to capture this period and the vast amount of web sites that have been created since, through a marginal number of designers. (...) These positions serve as milestones in our view"

Schoenerwissen/OfCD (California based [Anne] Pascual and Marcus Hauer) presented a selection of what they find to be the most remarkable websites of the last 10 years of Web design. They claim: "Visual design should mediate the technology".

Marcus Hauer and Anne Pascual, creators of Minitasking, the visual Gnutella browser, have spent the last year developing a radical re-invention of hypertext utilizing current techniques in information visualization. In their words, “txtkit is an Open Source visual text mining tool for exploring large amounts of multilingual texts. It's a multiuser-application which mainly focuses on the process of reading and reasoning as a series of decisions and events.” It aggregates the text viewing actions of multiple users into a navigable spatial form articulating data such as keywords, how people jump through the text, and the most read paragraphs. Txtkit is exploratory and seeks to solve ambitious questions. It is an excellent implementation of innovative ideas and its impact is still undetermined.

The picture at left is a tiny fragment of a visualization by Minitasking.com, a site in Berlin, Germany, that's run by an artistic research and design group called Schoenerwissen (literally, "beautiful knowledge"). Depicted in this fragment is the number of people at Microsoft, IBM, Sun, and elsewhere who are using the Gnutella peer-to-peer network to share songs by the alt-rock group The Cranberries.

Textkit - software, der giver os mulighed for at læse på en helt ny måde.

La visualizzazione dei dati è un processo che rende visibile la loro incorporea presenza, un microscopio calcolato che palesa i processi invisibili di formazione dei significati e degli agglomerati digitali omogenei. L'arte di costruire del software che tracci rappresentazioni coerenti con gli insiemi di informazioni che riceve in input dai canali della rete è ormai diffusa fra gli artisti della rete che possono attingere così ad una diversa materia prima e dettarne le leggi per plasmarla in tempo reale .

The Gnutella network is mapped by Minitasking using the notion of a visual timeline with new nodes being added as they are encountered. The end result does not look much like a conventional network maps, being more like a growing necklace of beads. Yet Minitasking's visualisations are strangely compelling, showing us the time-space 'bubbles' of the local Gnutella network neighbourhood around one's machine. It is fascinating to watch the ebbs and flows of queries and replies that pop up on the map.

These are closest to the 'normal' function of software, i.e. to 'make', 'do' or 'show' something else (...) mapping and visualising (like IOD's Webstalker, Schoenerwissen's minitasking or RSG's Carnivore)

Online Feature: "Minitasking vom Berliner Duo Schoenerwissen, gestaltet von Anne Pascual und Marcus Hauer (ihres Zeichens Künstler und Designer, aber auch Mitarbeiter des "Magazins für elektronische Lebensaspekte" De:bug." (...)

"Code und Interface haben nicht explizit etwas mit Kunst zu tun." Ein kreatives Ziel sei erst erreicht, wenn "die angewandte Technologie die Systeme und Formalisierungen durchleuchtet, hinterfragt oder auf den Kopf stellt", erklärt Pascual gegenüber DW-WORLD. Mit ihrer Software "Minitasking", einer Visualisierung des Peer-to-Peer-Netzwerks Gnutella, sind Schoenerwissen dieses Jahr für den Software-Award nominiert.

Matchboxes is another interesting experiment that has come out of using Processing.

"Wahrnehmung und Nutzung von virtuellen Räumen stehen im Zentrum eines Projektes aus Berlin, das auf der transmediale 03 für den Software Award nominiert ist. Die Gruppe Schoenerwissen (...) stellte sich vor einem Jahr die Frage: Wie kann man abstrakte Abläufe im Internet grafisch so darstellen, dass der Datent via Rechner visuell vorstellbar wird? (...)

The Visual Semantification of Complex Networks
"When p2p emerged, it made all the separate private archives into a single one. And this de-localization, de-privatization and de-subjectification of digital property created a data continuum from which the content industry has not recovered to this day. The equality of the data is consummated on the level of protocols, which do not undertake a process of evaluation into hierarchical ranks. Its horizontal extent and not its depth approaches infinity. The world is a list that is constantly changing. Or-as with minitasking-a quantity of circles or quadrants or melodies that are aligned according to hit ratios, magnitudes on the basis of which one reaches a decision to keep on copying it or to forget it as quickly as possible. "

Ein derart reflexives Interface bietet auch das Projekt Minitasking der Gruppe Schoenerwissen, das mit dem Award of Distinction Net Excellence ausgezeichnet wurde. Es basiert auf Gnutella, einem von Napster inspirierten Peer-to-Peer-Protokoll für gegenseitige Dateizugriffe. Wie Carnivore, so stellt auch Minitasking die Aktivitäten in einem Netzwerk visuell dar - als bubbles, deren Farbe und Größe je nach Inhalt und Datenmenge variiert. Die Schönheit der dabei entstehenden Gebilde zeigt sich somit als des Schrecklichen Anfang: der topographischen Fixierung des eigenen Verhaltens.

(...) "And Schoenerwissen's Gnutella-network visualization app, Minitasking, was pretty, but claiming that it addresses the issue of access is a bit of a stretch." (...)

(...) "La preuve par l'image, avec le site Ministasking du duo allemand Schoenerwissen. Les requêtes des internautes sur Gnutella (un des successeurs de Napster en open source) sont visualisées par des bulles de couleur, des titres de chansons qui flottent." (...)

"We've recently interviewed Marcus Hauer and Anne Pascual to find out more about their visual Gnutella client, Minitasking. Based in Germany and working under the name of Schoenerwissen, they are one of the few groups that are exploring alternative approaches to application design.

Die visuelle Semantisierung komplexer Netzwerke
(...) "Der User selbst ist der p2p Client und nur die minimalsten, unpraktischsten und überraschenderen der Interfaces können vielleicht einen Eindruck davon vermitteln, wie weit wir bereits sind. Auf dem Weg."

Are Those Bubbles in My Gnutella?

Minitasking is an interesting visual gnutella client being developed by schoenerwissen. Nodes in the network are shown by the coloured bubbles, with their size depending on how much content they contain.

"Die Programmiergruppe Schoenerwissen hat den ersten visuellen Filesharing-Client vorgestellt. Mit "Minitasking v0.0.9 Preview Edition" soll es dem User möglich sein, visuell Teil des bestehenden Gnutella-Peer-to-Peer-Netzwerks zu werden. Das wird verwirklicht, indem Suchanfragen und Dateitausch mit anderen Gnutella-Clients grafisch dargestellt werden."

"Conheça P2P na prática ? Quer imaginar como uma rede P2P funciona na prática? Pense em círculos coloridos, uns maiores que os outros, transparentes, que se interceptam e se desconectam todo tempo. Para mais ajuda, use o Minitasking, o primeiro cliente Gnutella visual." (...)