Web browsers are the gateway to the internet and make its use possible in the first place. They prescribe how we experience the web and what our scope for action looks like. The commercially driven development of the internet over recent decades has resulted in just a few standardised browsers, and participation in the web is increasingly limited to closed social media platforms.
«Cassiopeia» is a specially developed browser that goes against this trend. Surfing becomes unfamiliar and open again. The browser accompanies the user’s movements through the web, visited pages remain as a visual history and become navigable. Together with the browser, users can deconstruct and re-interpret the numerical basis of every website. This breaks down barriers, opens up new possibilities and reveals the structures of the web.
The web is shapeable! Adaptable! And fundamentally open!
«Sarah Iller transforms the World Wide Web from a purely receptive place into a space of active engagement – a radical step towards digital self-empowerment. Her self-programmed browser ‹Cassiopeia› reveals the hidden, determinist architecture of the web, breaks down familiar barriers and gives users the means to reclaim the web – just as free, critical and open as it was once intended to be.
This work is convincing because the tool itself becomes a manifesto: ‹Cassiopeia› is a medium, lab and space for action all at once – a rare example of visual communication that is not just representational, but creates real scope for action.» – Excerpt supporting statement of the Subject Area Visual Communication
«This work not only uses the browser as a tool or platform, but turns it into the subject itself by shifting the focus from content to infrastructure.» – Sarah Iller
«As a designer, I want to engage closely with people and topics, develop my own ideas and tools, immerse myself in many different subject areas and always learn something new in the process.» – Sarah Iller