[For an art form that prides itself on new levels of interaction with
its audience, most art on the web in the year 2001 seems only to be
variations on television channels. With the rise of Flash, and with the
limitations of basic HTML, what we define as interactivity within
net.art has been limited to accessing a series of ready-made
possibilities within an author's framework. Meanwhile, art on the web
has been predominantly self-reflective and self-referential. We are
bombarded with the anatomy of codes, the structure of networks.
Somewhere amongst all these flashing pixels the concept of narrative has
disappeared. "Lost Love" is a collaborative environment. It is web art,
and it is decidedly human. It presents data and collects data, and
anyone can participate–provided, of course, they follow certain rules.
Stories about love, lost love, posted by anyone who has a story to
tell.]

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Chris Basset: Seemingly everyone has at least one strange love story if
you ask them to tell you. It took shape over about 3 months of coding
and design, and was released in April 2001. The first release was plain
text with standard form elements and minimal design to build the story
database from friends while I prepared the final release.

Eryk Salvaggio: A lot of recent web art has ignored the idea of true
interaction and modification of any given piece of art. Lost Love
invites the viewer to radically participate in the work. How important
is this interaction to you?

CB: The ability of a project to include viewer reactions in itself is
interesting to me. Offline, my work is not so interaction friendly, but
recently has been taking the form of collaborative projects. With this
project, I wanted to create a discussion from the stories in order to
expand the stories beyond my own experiences into a broader narrative of
lost love.

ES: Do you consider it an art project or a design project?

CB: Speaking as a web designer (day job), there is no way I could
consider this a design site, as it violates too many of the rules of
usability. The nicely designed interface is appealing but intentionally
mysterious as to exactly what can be done. For me, the line between art
and design is opacity of intent. Design must be brutally simple and
aimed at the lowest common denominator. Art can ignore many of the
annoying constraints of design for the web because the experience is
worth the trouble.

..The design is really just a nice frame for the content. I'm
considering creating a WAP version and a Palm clipping app to allow the
site to be read outside of it's current environment.

ES: That's interesting. It could be possible for these stories to take
on a new dimension then- one could relate the stories from the locations
events took place in, recall a first date in the same restaurant, etc.

CB: The idea that one could read a story in the location where it took
place is very interesting. I would love to be able to do that. As of
now, I'm in the research phase of producing a WAP version…seeing how
the technology actually works and learning WML (wireless markup
language) and how to generate it with PHP and interface it with MySql
(the technologies I'm using on the rest of the site). While I work out
the tech issues, I'm keeping the site unchanged, and I've got no target
date for releasing a wireless version.

ES: That raises another point, which is that this kind of interaction
can get addictive. Somehow, no matter who you are or even _where_ you
are, someone is going to read it. How addictive is this project?

CB: Writing for this project is addictive. I'm finding that people
generally add bunches of stories, and some tend to come back repeatedly
to add stories. For me, I'm completely addicted to writing for this,
even to the point where I've had to invent some stories to continue
contributing to the project. I think with the current explosion of
blogs, there are more people willing to contribute to this kind of
project, not all of which are from a net.art type background. In fact,
I've had a number of diaryland blogs show up near the top of my referrer
lists, much more than any other linkage that I've gotten.

A friend of mine who I'm currently involved with realized that I had
been writing stories about her instead of discussing how I felt and what
I wanted with her. She was very upset and wouldn't talk to me for a day
or two after arguing with me on a bus ride across San Francisco. She
then retaliated by adding her side of the story to the discussion. We're
still arguing about my using the site to express how I feel about her
rather than talking. I've just had to play with gender and voicing,
phrasing, upper and lower case use, punctuation and so on, to keep the
relationship as a good source of stories.

ES: How many stories are true and how many are fiction? Part of its
appeal is this idea that these people have lost love, and are just
trying to get it off their chests, like messages in bottles and whatnot.
It's extremely human. Do you think the fiction undermines the "human
element?"

CB: The majority, probably 80 percent or so, of my stories are true. I
have no way to tell how truthful other people are being. I think that
even in the "true" stories on the site, there is some degree of fiction.
The truth always sounds better slightly dramatized and streamlined to
tell to others. For me, the truth of stories on the site is unimportant
if they can pass a kind of Turing test where a reader is not aware that
they are fictional. Often I end up thinking through an entire
relationship with a girl I meet from start to finish and nothing really
happens because in my mind I've already seen that something won't work.
That kind of fantasy relationship seems just as valid for exploration as
a lostlove as something that was acted out over dinner.

ES: What is the role of authorship in a community based work- and do you
think that's why a lot of artists avoid this kind of true interactive
set up in their work?

CB: This is one of those questions I dread because there's no easy
answer. The community is contributing to this project, and I am
moderating the submissions. I'm not trying to censor stories but to keep
the focus of the stories on lostlove. The interface and original concept
belongs solely to me. The stories belong to the contributors, but I feel
that I can use them for derivative projects. The gray area of ownership
is a bit scary though, and I can understand why it deters some people
from creating true bi-directional interaction in their work.
Appropriation of copyrighted materials is something that I've used
fairly extensively in offline works, and so I maybe have less fear of
problems than I should. In the end, I can claim authorship because this
work would not exist without my intervention to create it. The question
of authorship is something that open source software is also dealing
with, and there many of the powers that be are flat out against it
because it then becomes hard to determine ownership and to make money
off of the work. If we substitute fame/prestige for money, and art for
software, we have some interesting parallels here.