The Story
How a 1996 artwork predicted the future of search
The Artist
Gerald van der Kaap (b. 1959, Amsterdam) is a pioneering Dutch media artist who has worked across photography, video, CD-ROM, internet, VJing, and film. Since the early 1980s, he has used photography to access the entire field of media in the era of digital reproducibility.
In 1993, he created BlindRom v.0.9, one of the first dadaist CD-ROMs. He was among the first VJs in the Amsterdam and Rotterdam club scene. His work has been shown at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Centre Georges Pompidou Paris, Museum Folkwang Essen, and Kunsthaus Graz.
The Exhibition
"Under Capricorn: The World Over" was a landmark 1996 exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and City Gallery Wellington, New Zealand. It explored art in the age of globalization, featuring works by Nam June Paik, Bill Viola, James Lee Byars, and Jeffrey Shaw.
A significant portion of the exhibition was dedicated to internet art—work created specifically for the World Wide Web. The Dutch newspaper Trouw singled out Van der Kaap's KaapEngine as the only piece that truly engaged with the possibilities of the internet medium.
The Technology
KaapEngine was built on Glimpse, a full-text search tool created by Udi Manber at the University of Arizona in the early 1990s. Glimpse won the USENIX best paper award in 1994.
Here's the remarkable connection: Udi Manber went on to become VP of Engineering at Yahoo, then Amazon, and finally Google, where he led core search products from 2006 to 2014.
Gerald's 1996 artwork literally used search technology created by a person who would go on to build Google Search. The KaapEngine was not just art—it was a glimpse into the future.
The Concept
KaapEngine is a poetic image search engine. But it doesn't search images directly. Instead, each of the 330 photographs is paired with a fragment of poetry or literature—Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, Rossetti, folk tales.
When you type a word, the engine searches through the poetry to find matches, then returns the corresponding images in a tiled grid. You search through words to find images. The meaning travels through literature.
This is essentially what modern AI does with semantic image search—connecting language and vision through learned associations. Gerald understood this in 1996, 28 years before it became mainstream.
The Recovery
This archive was nearly lost. The original server at CWI (Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica) went offline years ago. The Stedelijk Museum's web presence from 1996 no longer exists.
In a message from 2016, developer Hylke Sprangers wrote to Gerald: "It's really difficult to get the SearchEngine online again—it's all 1996 technology. Actually quite a shame that everything from then is gone."
But it wasn't gone. The archive survived, and this project brings it back to life—both as historical preservation and as a living, modern recreation.
Credits
- Artist: Gerald van der Kaap
- Original Programming: Hylke Sprangers (CWI)
- Exhibition: Under Capricorn: The World Over (1996)
- Curators: Dorine Mignot (Stedelijk), Wyston Curnow (Wellington)
- Archive Recovery & Recreation: Mike Joyce & Karlie Kirkaldie of Goose Group (2025)
- Permanent Exhibition: Honkhuis
The Archive
The complete original source code, including the C CGI gateway, Glimpse configuration, and HTML framesets, has been preserved and is available on GitHub.