On the Web
An Essay on Web-based Animation
by Anthony Huberman

Moving beyond technical feats and "interactive" puzzles, web-based art
is ageing well. While the visual interface of the world wide web has
existed for all of seven years, artists around the world have nudged and
pried open its multi-disciplinary potentials. Graphic designers, sound
artists, creative writers, and visual artists have combined the soft
sculptures of computer software with the social sculptures of computer
networks. Fitting in a variety of art historical lineages, from Joseph
Beuys to John Cage, artists working on the internet have incorporated
contemporary culture's digital impulses and addressed the implications
of an emerging artistic medium. This exhibition attempts to present
certain backbone characteristics of what it means to work with animation
on the internet and to categorize some of the most significant and
clearly defined strategies: interactive, multi-user, and stand-alone.

Many artists take advantage of the user-driven nature of the internet. A
significant interactive system that many artists have uncovered is the
animated game. As artist and game designer Eric Zimmerman says, "games
are among the most ancient and sophisticated forms of designed
interaction," and artists have learned to combine this nostalgic appeal
with difficult conflicts and unresolved relationships. Natalie
Bookchin's The Intruder recounts a violent short story by Jorge Luis
Borges through "Pong" and "Space Invaders" game formats, forcing the
viewer to playfully implicate him/herself within an aggressive language
of jealousy. Panajotis Mihalatos' Flexible Planning makes a maze out of
the infinite variations inherent in the binary relationship of all
things digital and lures users with a flexible modernist grid. Far more
frustrating is JODI's ASDFG, as users struggle to navigate a browser
transformed into encrypted menus and uncontrollable streaming gibberish
that overtakes the screen, as a virus would a computer. More Op than
Fluxus, Mark Daggett turns web pages into bleeding watercolored
paintings: his Blur Browser animates each page by having it slowly go
blurry, while retaining its full functionality. Mouse movements cause
the colors to blend and swirl, enabling users to create their own brand
of abstract expressionism with their favorite site. Mouchette's Lullaby
for a Dead Fly also teases mouse movements as an innocent click leads
the viewer to a stream of meditations on death and fragility contributed
by past visitors to the site. Choosing the keyboard instead of the
mouse, Golan Levin and Casey Reas' Dakadaka empowers users to compose a
symphony of animations to the rhythm of their typing of letters.

Multi-user environments are the playgrounds of the internet. Chat rooms
set up around the many talents of Hollywood actors or of Playboy
Playmates take up countless hours of countless lives. Bringing
animation to such a complex platform is a challenging task, yet
contemporary online habits have bred a culture of simultaneity and
community, and artists are finding in multi-user animated environments a
way to satisfy and further explore that sense of immediate digital
proximity. Setting up a frame, successful projects leave it to the
users' movements, decisions, and fantasies to animate the screen. In an
immensely popular multi-user game, Eric Zimmerman and Word.com's
SiSSYFIGHT 2000 combines the aesthetic of early cartoon animation with
real-time interactive fights in a schoolyard. Often without the
resources to create such intricate environments, other artists find
quieter ways to animate the screen. Only across the web would it be
possible to create an animation out of a blank canvas. Along with Mark
Napier's p-Soup, Andy Deck's Open Studio is literally that: a blank
canvas on which logged-on users draw and scribble, adding and
subtracting in real-time to their "collaborative" drawing. The process
translates the realities of a networked culture into animation, a
culture where no image can be static and no movement invisible. John
Klima urges online users to share and mix sound files in a 3-D musical
instrument called Glasbead. Interested in hybrid visual-audio-
interactive experiences, the artist has created a context for users to
animate compositions in real time. In each case, it is in the artist's
absence that the animation builds.

The internet's most persistent virus is the somewhat abstract
requirement for interactivity. Dismissing the commonly-held belief that
the web is the 21st Century's answer to interactive art, many net
artists present their "users" (as the web audience is invariably called)
with unclickable, and therefore often unsettling, interfaces. One of
the best examples of these stand-alone applications might by YOUNG-HAE
CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES's DAKOTA. An aggressive animation made up of bold
black words, flashing by just slightly too quickly, tells a disjointed
story of a Homeric suburban journey towards death and alcohol, based on
poems by Ezra Pound. Not getting a word in, users are silenced and
immobilized by the endless sequence of exclamations. Interaction
screeches to a stop and gives way to an animation unforgiving in its
pace, volume, and font size. Xeth Feinberg's Bulbo also uses the black
and white aesthetic and suggests the relevance of old-fashioned cartoon
strips in digital space. In another instance, Sebastian Luetgert does
the web-surfing for you: simulating the unique proximity between
websites, with AOL one click away from Adidas, his Coils of the Serpent
reduces the process of navigating the internet to a sped-up series of
animated corporate logos and accentuates the user's inability to
contribute. Basicray's Hikaru marks an experimental beginning to
virtual actors: the digital avatar recites information from pre-loaded
and real-time online data sources. As artists and computer programmers,
Alex and Munro Galloway prefer to have real-time weather conditions
instead of greedy and impatient users trigger their animation. In Day
In, Day Out, an algorithm locates the computer's geographical location,
gathers real-time data from online weather maps, and translates the
information into a computer-generated image of a partly clouded sky. The
artists use the internet in a way that can never be interactive and the
almost imperceptible animation reflects that which no user can program:
real-time changes in weather patterns. Linking computer code to gestural
painting, Joshua Davis' algorithm randomly generates an angular and
fractured version of real-time post-expressionist flash animation.

Almost mimicking art history's trajectory from the inanimate (painting,
sculpture, photography) to the animate (film, video), net art has gone
from MUDs and MOOs, to HTML, to Flash, Shockwave, and Java, to
algorithms turning real-time data into dynamic visual landscapes. Of
course, while online moving images have not replaced static ones,
artists have found a variety of ways of joining and pursuing the
collective memory of animation. Partial as much to the Looney Toons as
to Pierre Huyghe, web-based animation reaches across cultural
backgrounds, aesthetic traditions, and art-making strategies. What all
of these projects have in common is the internet, always open-ended,
relentlessly wavering between public and private, formed and formless,
visible and invisible.

Anthony Huberman
Director of Education and Public Programs, P.S.1