Netzbikini Project by Eva Grubinger
http://thing.at/thing/netzbikini/

The Netzbikini project, located on Austria's The Thing website, allows
us ladies to produce our very own see-through bikinis. As profoundly
useful as that may be, unfortunately it doesn't prove to be all that
much fun. Since the interactivity of the project is limited to the
user's decision as to whether she requires a small, medium or large
bikini, downloading and creating a "Net Bikini" is about as different
from buying a pattern at a fabric store as checking one's bank account
balance online is from checking one's bank account balance at the bank:
more convenient, maybe, but not exactly creative. The shopper at
"Netzbikini" is limited to a single style and can't even choose one's
own fabric, since the proscribed fabric is sheer curtain material.

The first images one encounters on the project are a front, back and
side view of a comely young woman wearing only her see-through bikini,
goggles, a snorkel and fins. If one is anything like me, one's first
thought is, "um, what's that young woman got on, there?" and one isn't
referring to the snorkel. (And one's horrified second thought is, "what
is it about this project that has made me start sounding like Andy
Rooney?") One then chooses to proceed in English or German (in a pinch,
I'd have to call that interactive too), pick one's size, download the
bikini pattern in a postscript file and follow the instructions to print
it out and sew it together oneself. The instructions include a request
to take a photo of oneself, wearing the completed bikini, and email it
to Netzbikini's creators. The site also features a page with a dozen or
so photographs of successful bikini-wearers, among them one or two men
who have decided not to be shut out of all this fun.

When one tries to consider the possibility that there's more to this
site than meets the eye, one finds that if there is cultural commentary
here, it's one of the only aspects of this project that's well
camouflaged. But the main problem with the project is that it doesn't
make very good use of the artistic, creative possibilities of its
medium, the Web. There is so little interactivity here, one wonders why
this project is on the Web at all, until one realizes that–duh–she has
been requested to take a photo of herself practically naked and email it
to the site's creators. Could the goal of this project be to collect
pictures of ingenuous young women in see-through bikinis? Could the
apparent feminine name "Eva Grubinger" be an insidious facade behind
which lurk a bunch of run-of-the-mill Internet perverts? Sadly, one
suspects not.