Todd Anderson
Artist Statement
Why is the work that the New Frameworks project is working to preserve important to you?
An Experience was my first major chrome extension work and contained a number of innovations to the form. The work is structured as an alternate reality game that reveals itself gradually over time which means that even at the time it was release not everyone who engaged with the work saw its most interesting aspects. My hope is that through the archival work of the New Frameworks project more people will get to experience the work, and techniques for preserving browser extensions in general will improve.
What are the key ideas, issues, struggles, goals within your work?
An Experience is about the internet becoming sentient, an idea that seems more and more possible every day as large language models increase in capacity. My goal was to tell a story about a complex systemic evolution as an everyday person might experience it, i.e. in little fragments that build together over time rather than front to back like a book. I wanted it to feel like a hidden, mysterious world that was lurking just beneath your everyday internet browsing. This also created some of the struggles with the work in that it took some sustained engagement for the story to build up momentum, and almost definitionally it only revealed itself when you were trying to do something else.
Who is your audience?
My audience is any active internet user, especially people that like to browse the internet for fun. I also targeted people who use a computer and the internet for their day-to-day work, though they maybe were not so happy to be targeted in this way.
Who are your biggest artistic influences?
For this project specifically I was inspired by Elan Lee’s alternate reality games, Mark Fingerhut’s malware art, and Christine Love’s visual novel about browsing the early internet Digital: A Love Story.
Preservation Sketch
Read how we preserved Todd Anderson’s work, An Experience.