Fwd: G R A V I T Y - once again about scrolling and starbgs

Begin forwarded message:

> From: olia lialina <[email protected]>
> Date: Tue Jun 10, 2003 3:51:40 PM US/Eastern
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: G R A V I T Y - once again about scrolling and starbgs
>
> G R A V I T Y
>
> http://art.teleportacia.org/exhibition/GRAVITY/
>
> Since January 2003 Dragan Espenschied was the Art.Teleportacia
> artist in residence.
>
> He was really involved in gallery life and participated a lot in
> intensive discussions we usually have here about starry night
> and outer space backgrounds, horizontal and vertical scrolling,
> modern linking strategies. He literally brought new colors to
> Art.Teleportacia windows and scrollbars and forced us to rethink
> and remake the structure of the gallery. And it was a great
> pleasure to collaborate with him on Zombie & Mummy[1] episodes
> which were warming our networked community through the winter.
>
> Today I am happy to present Dragan's new work GRAVITY[2]. It is
> made at our gallery, and also for it.
>
> And my first question is: Why Art.Teleportacia?
>
> I thought that scrolling and space, the main topics of my
> new work, had always been among the main fields of
> competence and activity of this gallery.
>
> How could it happen that in the year 2003 you made such a simple
> project that is just using HTML rendering as introduced by
> Internet Explorer version 3[3]?
>
> Due to the fact that i didn't have to write a proposal and
> to enumerate advanced technologies i would be using to make
> this piece I was completely free to make what i think is
> meaningful and beautiful.
>
> The pressure to be up to date with technology appears
> insane to me. It doesn't bring any more beauty or pleasure.
> Instead it creates things that are hard to understand and
> impossible to handle. So nobody can actually experience
> them beyond reading the artist's concept.
>
> You are right. Net art works become groundless complicated
> nowadays. It looks more and more that net artists are here not
> to explore the net, but to invade it with new products. Not to
> entertain online people, but to make them feel that their
> computers are not fast enough, software is not new enough and
> education they got was wrong.
>
> In case of GRAVITY[2], the user is not asked to install
> anything, no need to start it with "about", "how it works",
> "register here", "Version 6 and higher" … one should only
> follow links, or better to say, to follow the logic of the page,
> which will bring you to the link.
>
> But what do you think, how far can you go with scrolling?
>
> Scrolling is an important part of nowadays graphical user
> interface and at the same time a powerful means of
> expression and involvement.
>
> It can for instance be used to tell stories, create the
> impression of space and movement, to change not only the
> position of the scrolled object but also of the spectator.
> I consider the diverse resolutions of monitors, scrolling
> and resizing windows a natural environment of computer and
> internet usage.
>
> But scrolling is slowly vanishing. Software like Flash
> erases the need for scrolling by its possibility of
> arbitrarily scaling and fixing the size of any graphical
> object … it evokes the lust of designers and artists to
> produce fitting formats, like on paper or video.
>
> And the Open Source HTML rendering engine Gecko ignores
> width and height definitions relative to the window size
> that are higher than 100%.
>
> Search engine culture is also very much against scrolling.
> Only the things at the top of a web page are considered to
> be important, people that scroll down are already
> considered to be computer nerds.
>
> When in 1996 I was making "If you want me to clean your screen
> scroll up and down"[4], scrollbar and scrolling was the main
> content for me. In "Some Universe"[5] I wanted the audience to
> scroll instead of clicking, to make them stay long on a long
> page. In Art.Teleportacia[6] itself, scrolling is the basis for
> the whole design. In their new work "000 TEXT"[7] JODI use
> scrolling because it won't help you anyway. Scrolling in "When I
> Am King"[8] tells the story. What is the dramaturgy of the
> scrolling in GRAVITY[2]?
>
> It is about lifting things, traveling space and revealing
> connections that will lead to the next part of the piece.
> The midi music encourages the user to adopt a stylish
> navigation practise: If you do it right, by moving
> scrollbars in a certain speed, clicking links in time and
> using back and forward buttons, it becomes an HTML music
> video.
>
> What kind of material you used to make GRAVITY spectacular?
>
> I used images i found on the web, a large part of them i
> had to manipulate quite a lot so they work as objects in
> the piece. For example NASA offers many pictures of rockets
> and astronauts, so do private pages of people interested in
> space travel. These sometimes huge photographs have to be
> sized down and cutted correctly to work on top of
> background images. Classical image collection sites are
> also still useful. They have all kinds of flags, lines,
> fire.
>
> The music is an amateur adaption of Rozalla's 1992 UK hit
> single "Everybody's free to feel good" which can be found
> on many midi file collection sites.
>
> Who exactly made all these files i composed GRAVITY of is
> not traceable. Most of these files have already been copied
> and used a thousand times on the web.
>
> All together, the piece is 242832 bytes. With a special
> frameset construction i have all images preloaded so
> switching pages becomes smooth. The music is also put into
> this frame that stays there all the time, so it keeps on
> playing.
>
> I tried to keep out any form of scripting from the code,
> but couldn't avoid it completely because of compatibility
> issues.
>
> Do you believe that online art projects should work in any
> browser on any platform?
>
> It's not about the market, but about the artistic
> challenge. I tried to include a little reward for each of
> the different browsers i was testing the project on. For
> example Internet Explorer on Windows gets a transition
> effect, Mozilla some nice page icons.
>
> A year ago I devoted to you Some Universe[6] - The Most
> Beautiful Webpage made of star backgrounds - because i thought
> you share my passion for them. Half a year ago you answered to
> it with quite a critical Letter of the Cosmonaut[9]. Now you
> make GRAVITY[2] where you work with outer space thematic and
> aesthetic again. So, what outer space means for you?
>
> In the early days of the amateur WWW you could see space
> backgrounds everywhere. They served as illustrations for
> the vastness of the new medium and the fascination its
> users had with it. This sort of page design is not widely
> spread anymore, instead the clear white color of business
> dominates. But i am still fascinated by the vastness.
>
> Why is there no email link in GRAVITY[2]?
>
> From our own experience with Zombie & Mummy[1] we know that
> in general the audience doesn't seem to be interested in
> communication with the creators a website, even if it is
> popular.
>
> Perhaps people are not writing in general because they think
> that artists are sort of professionals. Kind of Pro web culture.
> And you can't simply drop a short note: "Thank you, nice page!"
> Another explanation can be that to write an email to somebody
> you don't know personally can turn back on you as a flood of
> newsletters.
>
> Additionally i have the impression that the communities
> around weblogs are building borders in the net. Weblog
> readers would rather write something about a web site they
> have seen in the discussion facilities of their favorite
> weblog instead of writing a message to the author. And the
> poor authors have to wade through all the referrers in
> their access statistics to find out what people actually
> think about their work.
>
> And the last question. Your plans for the future?
>
> Future? Why future? I thought I could stay and work here.
>
> Yes. Sure.
>
> ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
>
> [1] http://www.zombie-and-mummy.org/
> [2] http://art.teleportacia.org/exhibition/GRAVITY/
> [3] http://browsers.evolt.org/?ie/32bit/3.0
> [4] http://www.entropy8zuper.org/possession/olialia/olialia.htm
> [5] http://de708.teleportacia.org/~james.larin/stellastar/
> [6] http://art.teleportacia.org/
> [7] http://text.jodi.org/
> [8] http://www.demian5.com/
> [9] http://a-blast.org/~drx/Letter_of_the_Cosmonaut/
>