ongoing

completed

The SIA

The Situationist Agent, or SIA for short, is a software application that crawls the web, starting at one of several pre-specified websites and following links as the ‘walk’ progresses. The agent collects images, text and e-mail addresses that it finds on its virtual dérive. The images and text are displayed in the agent's window. The bottom part of the SIA window includes a panel that displays debug messages, which included the information about the agent's whereabouts and actions. Drawing on the Situationist goal of questioning the Spectacle, our intent was to build a critically-inspired system that encourages reflection on the everyday use of computers as a tool.

• Leahu, L., Pederson, C., Thom-Santelli, J., Dmitriev, P. and Sengers, P. Uptake of Situationism Considered Harmful. In Extended Abstracts of CHI 2007, to appear.