“‘The Revolving Internet’ is one in a series of browser-based works by a Dutch artist that animated the iconic Google search page, drawing attention to the infrastructure that framed most users’ experience of the internet. By adding animation to the Google interface but retaining its functionality, originally, users could even check their Gmail through the work, the formalist experiments cheekily questioned the platform’s growing power.
With its heightened accessibility, net art often travels in unusual ways. "The Revolving Internet" reached a significant general web audience. Even today, 1.5 million visit the work each year (more than most museums see in that same time-frame.) The image above, for example, was shared by a user unfamiliar with the artist on the social media service Reddit to much conversation. Perhaps Google noticed the work, too, not long after the site’s launch, it introduced its “do a barrel roll” feature: if a user entered “do a barrel roll” into the Google search bar, the page would rotate a single time.” - from article on Google Arts and Culture, ‘The Making of Rhizome's Net Art Anthology: "The Revolving Internet’
“All these works display a simple, single behavior,” wrote Domenico Quaranta of this series. “They all deal with the home page of Google, which remains fully functional despite its unorthodox appearance. Whether you first read the domain name or first focused on the content of the page, when you put them together you get the joke and you probably smile. And then? Then you leave, maybe a bit disappointed (especially if you where told that this is a work of art) but also richer in a way. You now know, consciously or unconsciously, that Google is not God. That Google is not the absolute, untouchable, clear thing it pretends to be. It censors and can be censored. It can be displayed upside down. It can disagree, doubt and sleep. The Revolving Internet is like Andersen’s famous tale, “The Emperor’s New Clothes”: when you read it, nothing really changes, except your perception of those in power. Maybe your king is naked, too.” - mentioned in Net Art Anthology
“Take his series of ‘internets,’ the tweaks of the Google homepage, the default gateway to the internet for so many people, that remind us that even though the page is white and blank as if it came out of nowhere, the default is not nothing; it’s a setting that someone chose to put there and as such there is a flexibility and vulnerability to it. The Revolving Internet spins end over end as users try to navigate it. The Disagreeing Internet waggles in the browser window as if shaking its head no. The Censored Internet changes every character to an X. The Sleeping Internet dims and brightens to the rhythm of a sleeper’s breath, suffusing the coolly empty site with a human warmth. These give a personality to a web site, they make it weird in ways that only people can be weird. The default is already designed to be open and understandable to everyone and the artist gives them traits that anyone can imagine, though more human than the default, they still have the generalness of the default. There is nothing particular about them.” - words by Brian Droitcour published on his blog Culture Two