Some comments on a handful of the new artbase entries

These are just straight off the top of my head. I didn't bother to
read through all the texts accompanying the work, just offering first
impressions in an effort to generate a smidgen of dialogue on a once
lively mailing list. Perhaps others will do the same. Perhaps I'll do
more later. We'll see.

Interdiction is a great piece. It truly captures the spirit of
internet-based, collaborative publishing. With things like wiki-pedia
and Wiktionary, you just know that there must be a bunch of those
annoying little people that attempt to ruin a good thing by injecting
garbage. But when controls are put in to weed the bad stuff out, it
becomes interesting to see that bad stuff. So, great concept and the
fact that it's building itself through automated processes a big
plus. The only down side to is the visual presentation. It's not very
pleasing to the eye.

The Dot Star Generator doesn't really do much for me. Mildly
interesting visuals but gets boring quick. I don't really like having
to enter in new URLs to change them. Perhaps if it were being
controlled by webcrawlers? I don't know. The idea of full-stops as
stars just doesn't feel all that compelling to me.

I like IP Monochrome a lot. I have a thing about elements of
"interaction" that are actually outside of the interactor's control.
But I think the combined image of the monochromes would look better
as smaller units with no spacing between them. That way, instead of
it looking like a catalogue of previous visitors, it would look like
a single unified image (however abstract).

–
Pall Thayer
[email protected]

http://www.this.is/pallit