After visiting the Hell.com event "surface," opened last weekend for a
special RHIZOME viewing, Mark River wrote:

Hell is a dull land. I do not mean this as an insult. I say "dull" with
a smile which comes from the realization that the inferno art site of
the web amusement is what one would suspect.

Behind the gate the exhibit is the maze. Down this hall one may view
Fakeshop change bodies into digital maps. Over in this section we have
some blinking lights that reference code. Over there is a severed head
telling me of love. All of this is done without the need to explain the
interface. Just click, wait, and look for the next link. If the video
games are the high speed heaven of computer art, hell's choice of a
dull, wandering, aimless maze works as the anti-game. Perhaps this
anti-game is closer to a "real" image of our life on line.

t whid wrote:

i do like many parts of the hell tour, the whole clubhouse structure of
hell.com turns me off though.

it seems to be filled with artists who are very good at creating nice
animations and visuals on the net, sans meaningful content. this is my
overall feeling so please don't refute me with specifics, i'm sure there
are some meaningful things there, i just don't remember them.

and the kids at hell.com are down with the dhtml and flash i remember
that too, they seemed a little too down with it, lots of playing with
technique, with no point behind it.

138 INFOSLUT replied:

Who really wants meaning? There's such a relief around art students when
they say to themselves "Hey, no one really cares if I'm saying anything
anyway, so long as it looks good!" Then one creates pretty aesthetics
with zero content, slap on some post-modernist labels and hey hey,
there's your art degree!

I saw the hell exhibit myself and can't say I was let down, or amazed…
it's a lot of pretty fluffiness, precisely what i thought it would be,
which is neither inspiring or awful.

Roger Mexico:

Sucks, ha? The coolest party on the net is on, and you can't join. In
fact, you're not even invited. And the prospects for joining are not
exactly great either. No, you'll prey on the crumbs left on hell.com
events and then turn off your browser, start your mailer and bitch about
how much you disliked it. How much you hated those "kids with flash" and
about how horrible it was licking the binary crap left for you. Nothing
sucks more than an exclusive club that you cannot join.

Even if it was just a joke, a scam, a conspiracy to piss you off - even
then, the code generated by hell.com would be better written, their
expertise deeper and the Flash scripting/graphics better edited and more
integrated. Oscar Wilde once said that the world would forgive anyone
but a genius. Nothing much has changed there.

hell.com is the net-equivalent of someone having a more expensive car,
better looking date, nicer clothes and a brain occupied with something
more productive than slander.

murph the surf also wrote:

I found HELL very enjoyable, sort of like flipping through one of those
commercial design magazines at the bookstore. I didn't expect depth or
content but found some anyway. Many of the works showed inventive use of
dhtml and audio.

Hell.com itself seems to be the net.art rather than anything contained
within it because it exists as a network of people and couldn't exist
offline. There was give and take, call and response, access and denial.
I'd like to see more of that aspect explored in the future. I'm more
interested in projects like antiorp and others, which create themselves
as they go along and are impossible to present in any kind of packaged
form because they *are* the net and there is no object, virtual or
otherwise.

HELL has glamour.

OHRADO added:

I didn't mind it. It lived up to my expectations. the question is: is
clicking "interactive?" Is stumbling around blindly "navigation?"

Tilman Baumgaertel asked:

Isn't this hell.com stuff (mostly based on Flash) just the reason why
people got bored of CD-ROMs five years ago? While I admit that they take
the empty interfaces and the senseless clicking experience consciously
further than most of the CD-ROM-Art projects I know, it escapes me in
what sense this stuff is net art. Just because it is on the net?

carmin:

Flash is pretty flat. I prefer net.art that 80% of the netizins can
experience w/o plug-ins. But I also think i'm being too narrow minded.
Art should push the envelop. The code purist in me is older than the
artist adventurer within me.

stickman replied:

stickman thinks that people got bored of CDs because 1) of the
distribution problems and lack of any community that isn't
pre-programmed and 2) because most of the stuff was boring.

Flash artists will also be code purists in about 2 years.

I found most of the things I found at hell at least as stimulating as a
trip to a decently curated gallery. Most more.

Saying that hell is not art or is art is fairly senseless. Discuss the
content. Flash is a tool.

one of the greatest thing that the guys at hell are doing is the
closed-door "no strangers allowed" thing. C'mon! This is fun! We answer,
"Pleeeeaase! Just a peek!" They're creating community. They're having
fun.

Annie Abrahams didn't agree:

fine for hell.com, maybe

i don't like to be excluded
and i think millions with me

i don't like the attitude

won't go to hell anymore
unless it's open to all

would like to call for a hell boycot

josh wrote:

I'm curious for all of those who complain about the "fluffiness" and
lack of content on hell.com, what sites would you recommend as having
the depth that hell.com is accussed of lacking? (Of course, accussing
an event called "Surface" of being superficial seems somewhat
redundant.)

Personally, growing up playing video games and being currently
interested in user interface, hell.com is alot more enjoyable to
experience than any other web site I've seen yet, art or no art.