[An interesting thread ran this week on the Raw email list. At
issue was the counter-intuitive website structure used by Igor
Stromajer in his project "gps.art" (kid.kibla.org/~intima/gps). The
project begins with a series of pages, yet it is not immediately
clear to the user how to get from one to the next. We pick up the
thread as it begins to tackle the difficult topic of net.art
design…]

Orange Robot (orangerobot@HOTMAIL.COM) wrote:

net.art, in my view at least, has interactivity as one of its main
components. Interactive art was of course around before net.art but
human computer interaction is dramatically different than real world
physical interactions. Human computer interaction is a field of study,
some may say a science, that has been around for perhaps 20 some years.
Some of its main theories are based around consistency and
intuitiveness.

net.art should neither be expected to follow the laws of HCI to the
letter nor topple them to the ground. It should be informed by what can
be learned from it and attempt to enlighten standard more traditional
modes of interaction by embedding them with meaning and by subverting
their expected and accepted values.

Unfortunately, exploration, play and surprise can be rather hard to
evoke on a computer. Far fewer have the skills to evoke a meaningful
sense of interaction from an engagement with a computer than with a
painting, a film or a piece of interactive sculpture. Clicking
meaningless, cutting and pasting, closing zillions of windows, having
your browser crash and other activities are generally frustrating or
annoying. I'm not quite sure why this is. Obviously nobody wants to have
their computer crash while viewing a piece of net.art, it would be akin
to getting booted out of the museum halfway through the exhibit and
being forced to by a new ticket. Other minor mouse actions simply have
no inherent pleasing value in and of themselves. They aren't physical or
visceral enough. Interaction must other provoke the senses or the mind.
Meaningless cutting and pasting only provokes tedium and annoyance.

Martin Wattenberg (mwattenberg@SMARTMONEY.COM) wrote:

A web page with responsive and easy navigation feels luxurious. It's the
net equivalent of gold or ebony.

A web page whose navigation makes you work–e.g. editing text URLs–
feels painful. It's the net equivalent of concrete or barbed wire.

Some sculptures should be made of fine wood, others work better with
more brutal materials. The question about the gps.art site is, Why did
the artist choose concrete rather than ebony for this particular
sculpture?

Conor McGarrigle (conor@stunned.org) replied:

Thats an excellent analogy. The more I work in net.art the more it
becomes apparent that the navigation structure defines a piece in the
way that the choice of material defines a sculpture. Make the wrong
choice and you can wreck a good idea.

tom vincent (tomv@CRISSCROSS.COM) wrote:

Maybe the question is how important is aesthetics - "looks" - to
net.art? I think the answer is it's not important at all. It can be
important but it's not a necessity. (remember those photoshop filters).
Net.art has been "rough" from the beginning. As web design advances and
gets more sophisticated, more and more the rough guerrilla approach can
be useful for an artist, especially as us designers have a lot of money
and skill-resources to play with which are often way out of the reach of
an individual artist. Those artists who do have access to the high-end
resources will (hopefully) use them in ways designers won't, and
surprise us all (although I guess that's partly what hell.com were(are)
trying to do - to a mixed reaction if I remember rightly, eh guys.) All
you need to make work on the web, though, is a text editor and some kind
of ftp software, just like at the beginning.

corey.eiseman (toe-gristle@usa.net) adds:

Perhaps the question is how aesthetics and functionality relate to each
other, how they work together and/or how they oppose each other. Putting
aside net.art for a moment, consider how in many traditional art
circles, "functional art" is very often segregated into a seperate
category, and some people actually consider it as one level below "real"
art, perhaps *because* of its functionality. A painting or a sculpture
has aesthetic qualities but is functionally useless, for all intents and
purposes that's what makes it art. On the other hand, a ceramic cup or a
chair as an art object can have aesthetic qualities as well functional
qualities. It has always been interesting to me that the label
"functional art" implies that these objects exist as art *despite* their
functional qualities.

In this sense, it is interesting to see what happens when this
relationship is applied to net.art. Is the relationship different than
in traditional art? One could say that functional net.art is simply web
design, and that has nothing to do with art, but I tend to think that's
an oversimplification. Functionality on the net deals in part with
accessibility of the work, intuitiveness of navigation and ease of use.
As has been said, these are all things an artist can manipulate and
confront the user with, even if the goal is to be non-functional, anti-
functional, or in some other way experimentally functional. Knowledge of
interface design might help a net artist with these goals, if only
because one is usually more successful breaking rules if they are first
familiar with those rules to begin with.

I found the experimental navigation in the gps work interesting because,
once i figured out what it was i was supposed to do and started doing
it, I was involved in a way that seemed more gripping and engaging than
if I was just doing the standard mouse clicks. I had exerted a certain
amount of energy so that I was less likely to give up half way through,
because I became determined to see what the whole point was. Once I got
to the work itself, i was a little disappointed, and still think the
navigation is more interesting than the gps art. I think there *could
be* a connection between the navigation and the work, as in url == gps,
but I didn't feel that connection was explored in any kind of
interesting way. As a result the navigation seemed more like a gimmicky
front door and the payoff was disappointing because of it. If the piece
is going to be developed further, i might suggest exploring that url /
gps relationship and making it more central to the work itself.

It seems to me that functionality and aesthetics have a more important
relationship in net.art than in most other art forms, and that the two
are more interrelated and co-dependant on each other because of the very
nature of the medium.