A trip through the hyperuniverse of the World Wide Web on full autopilot: The Universal Digest Machine is an installation featuring a web spider that crawls the net, digesting web pages and outputting a brief analysis of their contents. The display unit is an industrial thermal printer mounted on a plinth. For every page visited by the spider, a receipt is printed, falling on the floor unless taken by a visitor. The receipts become a sprawling heap of intriguing but ultimately incomprehensible artifacts, obviously representing information but no longer in a human-readable form.

Internet space is much like the physical universe—greater than any single person could comprehend or personally navigate. Since the spider is indiscriminate about the links it follows, it ends up in places most human users would never reach. As it does so it reveals a Terra Incognita of obscure web sites, giving equal space to Microsoft white papers, Disney collectibles and scat fetishism. Antique maps were often marked with dragons and fantastic monsters where the cartographers’ knowledge of the world ended. In the same way, there may well be terrible and wonderful things lurking on the web, just out of reach.

Some weirdness regarding the topology of web space was discovered during development. Networks of interlinked fake web sites advertising pornography and online gambling form circular references to trap spiders, while blogs frequently feature more than 500 links and 500kb of text on a single page. While debugging the spider it repeatedly choked on American Pro-Bush Republican blogs due to their sheer volume.

To spiders, blogs are self-referential black holes, so search engines have started to give them low relevance ratings or avoid them altogether. Some observers predict the death of the famous Page-Rank mechanism, all the while bemoaning their dropping Google rankings. For as we all know by now, on the web you are only worth as much as your Google rank.