RE: [-empyre-] real net art

["Millie Niss" <men2@columbia.edu>]

I agree that talking about the technologies can seem brouing and whatnot,
but there is a big difference I think between people who work primarlity (or
even started in) flash and older ner arrtists.  The latter tend to have more
emphahsis on text, and that really is an effect of the technology but it
affects the genre of the art.  There was a time when lost of people were
making hypertext.  That was because one of the simplest most elegant
technologies around was plain HTML and everyine had it.  So we got a whole
genre of literature.  I don't think the the hypertext pieces ever would have
gotten wrotten if Flash or a similar technoilogy were available in that
period, because flash makes fancy graphics and anuimation easy, but it is
kind of a pain to do hypertext.  It's perfectly possible to do it, but it
isn't built into the technology as almost the default mode of expression the
was hypertext literature is an obvious extension of HTML since that is a
hypertext markup language, though intended for nonliterary uses originally.

I think we arte lucky in a way that Flash came after HTML, or we would have
lost tremendous amounts of good textt-based pieces.  Also, many of the besty
text based works used programming which wasn't possible in early Flash (now
of course flash Actionscript is a very complete language) so the pieces had
complex interactivity and not just links to follow.  They remembered where
you had been and substituted n new material, they contained puzzles athat
were different on each run, or the rearranged the story each time you views
them.  Like any genre of literature or art, this was not renered "obsolete"
by the more visually based technologies.  That ios like saying books are
obsolete which of course some people think but the majority of us don't
think -- just look at the numbers of computer books we have in our offices
or computer rooms...  In that spirit, I the last thing I did was a very
small, completely un-innovative technologically hypertext called Bedlam
www.sporkworld.org/bedlam The only technical thing I did that was new to me
doesn't show in the final product, which was that I finally used a
Dreamweaver Template, which I should have been using a lot but had never
learned to do, so I was just copying pages to make new pages.

I hope the day isn't over for fully realized hypertexts with art and many
many nodes etc.

The Flash thing has also brought in genres that are new, some of which are
somewhat annoying in many implentations.  Since it is easy in Flash to make
something happen whenthe mouse passes over a button (often invisible) there
are quite a number of pieces that consiste of effects that happen when yuou
put your mouse over the right spots and often they aren't marked and it is a
sort of game to find the spots.  Some of these pieces are brilliant,
natuarally, but many are a little lazy.  The artist puts together some
video, some photos, some animation and so on, and just makes it show when
the user goes over the secret place.  There may be little thematic unity in
these pieces and yet because of the quality of the indivdual clips and
photos and whatnot, you have to class it ar "art" or even good art, but you
fear it is art you don't understand, and if you only understood it would all
make sense.  Then there are pieces in which something happens at every
position of the mouse, which can be more interesting.  My first piece was in
this genre but I had never even heard the term "web art" when I made it.  It
takes too damn long to load, but otherwise works (Voices of Madness in my
webworks page on www.sporkworld.org)

Millie