Slava Rybin: Crawlers Give the Web's Invisible Readers a Body
Slava Rybin's Crawlers turns the bots that read the internet into 1,111 crawling creatures that roam a Wikipedia style page, play it like an instrument and write new text from what they find.
"Nowadays, much of the internet is explored not by humans, but by machines." So opens the statement for Crawlers, the new work by Slava Rybin. Invisible programs move through websites, follow links, read pages and collect information, more and more of it as raw material for artificial intelligence. "Yet, despite their constant activity, we rarely encounter these machines or consider their behavior." In Crawlers, released on Ethereum on October 29 by The Daily Program, the online program of the gallery Fellowship, with OpenSea, Rybin "gives these invisible processes a body, a voice, and a habitat."
Each of the 1,111 works is a unique creature drawn from the anatomy and movement of spiders, centipedes and other crawling organisms. They are built from the point, the square and the circle, a look that mixes "rigid technical expression with dynamic, lifelike movement," and they move through a system that blends algorithmic and nature inspired distributed models. Every crawler lives on its own page modeled on Wikipedia. Wake it up and it starts exploring, responding to words, images and links as the viewer guides it. Some move slowly and methodically, others race across the screen. Some weave words into webs of relationships, others scatter paragraphs apart. Their movements also make sound, so reading turns into "an improvised musical performance," and the page becomes "both an ecosystem and an instrument."
What the creatures read becomes material for new writing, which piles up beneath the original article and can be scrolled and explored in turn. Rybin generates it with what he calls "a boiled down LLM predictor," a deliberately simple system meant to let viewers "feel what machine learning is at its core." An encyclopedia slowly becomes an unstable archive that keeps rewriting itself, and the work asks the question underneath the whole AI moment: "How are we different from the machine?"
The crawlers can also leave home. Saved as a browser bookmark, each one can be released onto any website, where it walks in from offscreen and starts working through the page. Rybin, a systems artist who builds with TouchDesigner, Python and WebGL, describes his practice as an exploration of perception, cybernetics and emergent complexity, drawing on biological algorithms and contemplative traditions. Crawlers puts all of it in a small, curious body that reads the web the way the machines do, except this time you can watch.
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