Andrew Wanliss-Orlebar is a founder of totalny.com, the first designer
of ada'web, and former Interface Director for WP Studios and the Primary
Group. He is one of the youngest members of the New York Art Director's
Guild.

I know Andrew from University – there he worked with computers,
moonlighted at ad agencies, and curated art shows at the ICA in
Philadelphia. For as long as we have been friends, Andrew has been
extremely interested in understanding creative processes and making new
"environments." He has been designing, on and off the Web, for more than
five years.

Before Andrew left for an around-the-world-journey, we spoke about his
approach to interface design, and the founding of sites totalny and
ada'web.

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Some of Andrew Wanliss-Orlebar's work can be seen at:
http://www.never.com/+/
http://www.primarygroup.com/
http://www.adaweb.com/interface1/

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RG: So how did you get involved with art and design in college?

A.W-O: I jump-started something called Artists Guild. We put together
some student shows, worked on 'Day without Art.' Later on we had a show
at the ICA, a show about relationships to media.

RG: Tell me more about the ICA show.

A.W-O: The show was called "Closing In". The idea was looking this sort
of "loop" we have in the media – this love/hate relationship, the
refusal to believe anything that comes from the media, but at the same
time, the usage we make of the media to get famous, get coverage and the
complete addiction we have to it. Fifteen years ago, there was a lot of
anti-media art. I wanted to find artists who had more ambivalent
relationships to media. Basically, there seems to have been a closing
in, a cycle that had become tighter and tighter between us and the
media. There is more awareness, and a lot of playfulness, more of a
two-way relationship and a lot of uncertainty. Those were the
relationships we wanted to investigate.

RG: I think the whole rhetoric of choice we have these days (at least
in the States) allows for multiple relationships with the media. We can
look a bit more closely, and also avoid some political decisions. Or at
least a certain kind of political decision. I mean, with women's
magazines, in the 70s and 80s, one couldn't read them and still
identify as a feminist. But in the 90s, you can "choose" or specify the
way you engage…

A.W-O: Exactly, on the basis that you choose you're some how justified
and no longer manipulated. Again, you are proud to indulge, but you'll
dismiss it just as fast. That's just what we were looking at.

RG: You studied media theory, do you want to talk a little bit about
that?

A.W-O: Yeah…a lot of people are studying media these days. They've
found that it has increased 1000% in the UK recently. Basically, I
spent four years learning how a kid tells the difference between a horse
and a picture of a horse.

RG: When did you start getting interested in the Net, because the Web
wasn't really up then?

A.W-O: The first mention I even heard of the World Wide Web was at the
ICA when I was preparing the "Closing In" show, and some guy came by and
said "well, have you heard about the World Wide Web?" and of course at
the time I hadn't. The first time I really got *involved* was when I was
in South America and wanted to get in touch with people in other places.
South America used network technologies fairly early on first for
educational purposes, and also because it was useful for accessing
remote regions where there were no other forms of communication. The Net
was initially less effective in the States since you could equally well
pick up the phone or the intercom. So right there just when the Web was
just earl gray pages, the occasional button, maybe a .gif if I was lucky
– that was when I got into it.

It was just fascinating to be yanked out of my South American context
and be thrown into somewhere miles and miles away that I was very
familiar with right there on the screen. That is when my interest in the
Net developed. Also, by that time, I had a fair amount of experience
doing design on computer, so I understood that the computer could be a
pretty efficient tool. Putting those two together, design and computer,
came slowly.

RG: The first design work you did, you worked at an advertising agency,
using PhotoShop and what else?

A.W-O: I was using basic graphics software: Illustrator,
PhotoShop…traditional packages in the field from the early 90s. I had
done a lot of very computer intensive editorial design , and actually
the advertising experience was refreshing because the budgets were so
low that our best tool was probably the copy machine.

Often years later when I was working on web pages, I'd have people stop
working at their machines, say, "look pull away, here's pen, here's
pencil, let's think here and not spend hours with finicky software and
too slow machines. Give yourself fewer tools and maybe get more
creative." That's the lesson I learned early on at that ad agency, that
you shouldn't sit at your computer all day. So that was a really
interesting re-focusing time, because I was already sort of using
machines a lot at that point.

[…]

RG: You moved to New York, and then what, WP, ada 'web. Let's talk
about that.

A.W-O: You're right to ask me these different questions about the art
effort and the computer effort, because it wasn't actually through a
self-conscious impetus that they came together. But, I started getting
together with people whom I eventually founded TOTAL
(http://www.totalny.com), because this guy had an idea for a CD-ROM
about young New York musicians and poets and spoken word performances…
At the time, CD-ROM was not completely dead, which it is these days.
There were more diversified titles, and they were actually selling.

RG: What was that title?

A.W-O: It was never produced. The CD-ROM was mostly about music and read
poetry. We also designed some extra interactive sections where you could
meet the artist. In doing that we realized that we were promoting people
in New York, not promoting people in a commercial sense, just getting
people out there to be discovered. We realized maybe this Web thing
might be more appropriate because we could kill our distribution
problems. Then we started thinking about a guide to all these different
events in New York – we wanted it to be a guide to small, underground
art events. Eventually, that grew into a guide of New York period. We
started pitching it around to a couple of people who already had very
small web sites about New York, and eventually we found someone who
loved the idea, and had a bit of money, and that was it. That was the
birth of totalny (www.totalny.com).

RG: And that person was John Borthwick?

A.W-O: Yes, that was John Borthwick. He brought in two people whom he
knew, Guy Garcia, who'd been at Time magazine and The Times for about
ten years, and someone else for marketing. We were a grand total of
seven people.

At the same time, John had been working on ada 'web – which was not
called at ada 'web at the time – it was a separate project of John's,
part of his long-standing dream to do something online with Jenny
Holzer. He had a fascination for Jenny's work and had spent the previous
year investigating all these interactive technologies…and he wanted to
see them come together. He knew Benjamin Weil's curatorial and critical
work, met him through some common friends, and got him ivolved. And John
understood that I was interested in the art aspects of things too. So it
was basically the three of us. John knew he was thinking about Jenny
Holzer and what she could do. Benjamin knew he was thinking about art,
but neither were able to think about the Web at all, because it was
still a complete mystery. I think the triad worked very well with my
coming in going, "okay, this Web site thing needs to look like
something, this needs to feel like something, this needs to be an
environment". I wanted to find the right metaphors. From a graphic
perspective – a design perspective – you could really do very little,
which was an interesting challenge nonetheless. It seemed to be about
putting highly detailed pictures in the middle of a box. We were
definitely thinking: "Okay is this about rooms, is this about depth? How
do we create an environment here?" Asking those questions very early on
was really interesting.

RG: Did the metaphor of rooms' work?

A.W-O: That particular one disappeared. For a while we imagined it could
look like a little map of a house or something like that. We ended up
going with something very abstract, which, at the time was quite rare.
At this point, the Web has gone there and back, but every other Web page
was basically six big icons with what's in the site. Or sites were
something like Bianca's Bathroom, which had just come up , and was just
room after room.

With ada 'web's first iteration we went for this somewhat unclear
creation, just trying to suggest some sort of space. Also, the first
version of ada 'web – was never live – it was basically just shown to
Jenny Holzer, to show her that we were for real – it was something that
was built in a few days in Jon's apartment and a few nights, at a point
when I didn't understand that HTML files needed extensions. It was a
complete mystery. We didn't even know Netscape was around yet. We were
all on Mosaic. I had no understanding, whatsoever, of how the language
worked. This was literally my first few minutes in HTML and I had to put
this together for the next day. I fell asleep during the presentation.

From that point it was only nine months later that there were trade
shows with bimbos telling you about your website, and about two years
later that there were huge trade shows with millions of people and
millions of dollars to be spent, and advertising on TV and everywhere
about this and that and everything going on the Web. It's very hard to
think back to those early days and just exactly how mysterious and
primitive the Web was. That's a good way for me to get into my next
point, job titles. For a long time, we had no idea what it would take to
build a website. I'm not even sure we were necessarily calling it a
website then. We didn't know what building was. We didn't know anything.
It's very hard to go back to that stage.

RG: Before we get to job titles, you keep saying you didn't know
anything. What were you trying to work out?

A.W-O: What we were doing and what building a site meant. Our main focus
then was on understanding narrative, trying to insert some non-linearity
in a very artificial way into things that were written by regular
journalists, who didn't understand non-linearity.

RG: When was this exactly?

A.W-O: May '95 Total was officially launched, so I'm talking about
February and March, when we started really building it out. We just
didn't understand who we needed or what we needed. We knew that we
wanted all this video and audio stuff, even though it wouldn't be
another year and a half before that could run smoothly at all, nor could
people download it on their 14.4 modems, and, of course, we only had one
modem in the office at the time and we'd go, "I'm going on-line!." By
then we were maybe using the 0.9 Beta Netscape. It was pretty exciting
stuff.

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RG: Why did the totalny/adaweb/primary group think Web sites needed
video? And what was the controversy about job titles? Let's talk lingo.

A.W-O: Because this was being called "multimedia." Everyone was exalting
the dawn of "multimedia." "Multimedia," of course, now means absolutely
nothing. We wanted to say, "okay this is different from a regular guide
or magazine because it has video and audio". Of course, the amount of
people on the Web was relatively - in terms of the numbers today -
insignificant. It was already in the millions, but it was a very
different population then – most users were undoubtedly still academic
and not necessarily interested in what we were doing. So, initially we
were all designers, and then I realized very early on; it seemed like my
work was really related to interface design and software design, and so
I became an interface designer, interface director. Then other people
became "editors" - a name which was resisted all along - "no, they had
to be something else here." People at other companies had cards that
read "Web Guru," and "Web Master," and "Content Guy," and all sorts of
different things.

RG: I guess the Web has always been a bit obsessed about definining
itself as different. And, there are also those who are obsessed with
mastery – the newest/greatest/latest syndrome which comes with working
on something that is still evolving. Is "interface" a new term?

A.W-O: Not really. I think at the beginning of the Web we were all
persuaded that thousands of new positions would come about, like all
these new professions of Web Guru, Net Expert, etc.. Now that things
have died down, people are far happier getting a marketing person who
knows nothing about the Web, but who knows something about marketing,
and getting a writer who knows how to write - forget doing interactive
story-telling – and getting a designer who knows how to design, and a
programmer who knows how to program. The perception that everything
about the medium is completely new has softened.

Software is not exactly an antique industry – it's been around for a
little bit longer, and it has its leaders and principles and formulas
and trade organizations and conferences. The problem is that software
has little to do with all the crazy designers who started all the
different Web companies, nor does it have much to do with narrative
story-telling and other things we might associate with the Web.

RG: What did you think of the sidewalk.com print campaign, the ads that
look like software interfaces? There is one in an art gallery with a
menu on top.

A.W-O: Sidewalk.com is actually a good example of looking at how
interface fits in, because Microsoft recently morphed me into an
Internet Explorer point of view. IE is soon to be their interface –
basically the user's central perception of the operating system. They're
working on incredibly finite details to make IE behave just like regular
software does. And who has been working on that? Software design people,
interface designers of the pre-existing kind, not people who know all
about Director, Flash, and GIFConverter. They're bringing back in the
old troops. Those two industries, software and design, are now getting
together. I don't think the Web is all about the interface, because
there is truly a part about the narrative, and the visual appeal unique
to it. Maybe they'll come closer together, maybe they'll also split
apart. That is, on one side there is GroupWare, which is getting
incredibly intense - one can change spreadsheet tables on the fly in the
Web page and just hit "ok" - so that's going to start look a lot more
like software, if not, looking exactly like your software.

On the other side, there will be people who continue to push the Web as
a mode of expression, be they corporations or individual artists, and
they're going to be much more about making things look like TV or
CD-ROM's – flashy and much more graphics-intensive, without much clear
functionality. After all, that is what interface design is about, I
mean, it's usually called human interface design or computer human
interface design, it's about the relationship between the machine and a
person and masking all the things that the computer can do at that one
point and in time, making it all very clear. So it is very closely
related to human factors. While some very creative and inventive
solutions can be found, for me design is not about being wacky and
crazy. While for a lot of designers it definitely is.

RG: If you want to, talk about any cool Web designers, creative
solutions, or websites you know.

A.W-O: It's funny, my preferences and my attention is divided between
two very different things and I think that's exactly the sort of
distinction I was addressing a minute ago. You get the really creative
people who are doing wild graphics and just amazing, intricate
exploitation of different aspects of the medium. Like a weird use of
frames which is really creative, a la Jason Mohr or Yoshi Sodeoka from
Word (http://www.word.com). I regularly will really admire something
like that. Really inventive graphics, or a great interpretation, a great
rendering of something that is written in a graphic way – those
achievements can be amazing.

At the same time, because I look at interface design as something that
is very functional, and that has to be clear, and that is very related
to software design, sometimes I'll find some incredibly austere business
site to be sheer genius because the buttons are in the perfect place,
regardless of how they look. So, for example, the quality of the
information design in sites done by Studio Archetype, like the one they
did for the IBM Chess Tournament (http://www.chess.ibm.com), that was
just sensational. There was a coherence, a degree of planning, that was
just really clear in that site, which made it so admirable.

RG: Do you ever look at Web-based art projects?

A.W-O: Absolutely, at ada 'web we wanted to create something that was
media specific. It is probably for the better that there are a lot of
art projects on the Web that use the Web as simply another channel. You
don't necessarily need to make something that is just for the Web. If
you suddenly arrange these photographs into an interesting narrative,
you just click through, but the things are placed well, and the space
around it and the pacing of the piece gives you an interesting
environment. To me that is sufficient to make it different from what I
would have lived in a gallery or going through a book.

I think there's a lot more of that going on right now and probably the
things that are truly unique to the Web are few and far apart. But, we
don't need to make it so unique and new that we accept nothing else.
Museums are beginning to buy Web pieces or integrate them into shows -
we had a piece that we developed with Lawrence Weiner that was part of
his show in a gallery last fall. The more the Net is demystified and
thrown in to the mix as just one more medium, the more it is finally
going to get used.

That's again what I like about the fact that we are hiring "normal"
people to work in Web companies. You've got to get over the fact that
it's this complete revolution – because for me, ultimately, the real
revolution is when the Net infiltrates itself into daily life. The day
that you use the Web six times a day for errands. Instead of saying,
"okay, now I'm going to cruise the Web." That's the point at which it
will have a distinct value in our lives. That's the point at which its
going to be much more interesting for people to do really crazy wild
objects because more people will see them, and it will make sense to
more people, and more people will have the knowledge that they need in
order to explore them - ada 'web is a good example of people who would
just go "aww fuck it I don't understand this." They might well have
said the same thing in a gallery, but if it was on TV they might have
watched. With television users know how to do everything involved: turn
up the volume, turn down the volume, and sit back. Right now the Web is
still very much for an "in" crowd.

When you begin to infuse things with ideas that are tried and tested
from elsewhere then maybe you're getting more interesting. A lot of
things on the Web are just about the Web, but I find, a lot of Art is
just about Art. Who knows if that sort of self-reflexiveness will die
out.

RG: What book do you have with you?

A.W-O: "Creating Killer Web Sites" by David Seigel
(http://www.dsiegel.com) - who I happen to not be able to bear in the
least - although he is a fantastic example of how little talent it takes
on the Web to turn yourself into a superstar!

RG: He's the dude who made TEKTON for Adobe, right?

A.W-O: Tekton. Which I find even worse.

RG: Which one is that?

A.W-O: I'll draw it for you, it's horrendous. Umm.I don't think that
necessarily deserves to make you a superstar. It's very cursive. (Andrew
draws example of font)

Now I think there are second generation books, which are being a bit
more intelligent. The first ones actually had nothing to say, they were
sort of like these books about Java that came out the day after Java is
released. By the way, no one has benefitted more from the Web more than
traditional media, in terms of the amount of books they've been able to
sell, and mags they've been able to spin off.

RG: Do you know Java?

A.W-O: Yes, but I'm more interested in working with people who *really*
know Java, because they've been thinking that way for much longer than I
have. I don't want to box them up in some little definition, but
they're probably more a programmer than I am, and I'm probably more
something else than they are. I'm far more interested in getting their
input, if there's enough people on the project that you can have a
programmer and a designer, than just doing it all myself. I would
rather be working in multi-disciplinary teams in a way similar to way
the film industry does or the industrial design industry does. Not
everyone can or should do everything. The more competent everyone is in
their individual disciplines, the better. I think the Web will
eventually get to that. As each of these technologies gets more complex,
gets a bit richer, gets a bit more mature, there's going to be a point
at which you probably will need different people to do that, or just
better software that does more of it for you. A lot of software now
takes care of your forms building, and your basic animations and
whatever, but there will always be experts who are making non-Clip Art
sites, hopefully. I really value this industry, because it's yet another
multi-disciplinary one and I like learning from other people who do
different things.

RG: Sounds like a friendly cultural studies way of doing multimedia.

A.W-O: Cultural Studies was my other major in college.