At first glance, Erik Loyer does not seem that unusual. Like many who
wear the title "net artist," he's held a variety of corporate positions
in which he could fine-tune his creative and technical skills, and is
now working to maintain a life as an independent artist, in spite of
tough economic conditions. But the economy is not the only thing that
Loyer is challenging. The artist is also using his work to question the
values and preferences we hold about internet-based art.

Calling Erik Loyer a net artist sells him short. His talents extend to
writing literature and poetry, composing, performing, and recording
music, and of course animation, programming, and design. Loyer's
multidisciplinary capacities translate into synaesthetic art: work which
is experienced visually, aurally, tactilely, and even orally–if you
follow the instructions to sing along in one of his pieces…

Loyer studied film and television at USC and went on to a short stint as
audio editor for Voyager. He and several Voyager alums left to found
Inscape, a game developer, where Loyer created interface and game
designs for a number of titles, including cult favorite, "Dark Eye."
Loyer quickly appropriated the interactive design aesthetic of computer
games in his visual art. His first solo art project, CD-ROM "aug 6
1991," a meditation on language, employed real time animation in
allowing users to navigate his poetic content.

Inspired by the response to his work, Loyer began making art for the
web. At the same time, he founded the information architecture division
at the Los Angeles office of Razorfish. One would think that this
intellectual environment would compel Loyer to be always adopting the
newest technologies. On the contrary, he has developed rather low-tech
work that questions this need.

Users are always trying to convince Loyer that his site, "The Lair of
the Marrow Monkey," is Flash, while it is in fact Shockwave-only. The
Lair is a nine chapter interactive narrative about a self-proclaimed
"vision quest." The lead character and narrator, Orion17, is traveling
through the fictional town of Keye when he has a strange vision, during
which he is able to see the world as it really is. At first frightened,
Orion soon wishes he could experience such a vision again. He learns
about "marrow" a substance which causes people to have visions of the
"Mnemonos"–the reality of which the world we see is only a small
representation. (This was in 1997, before "The Matrix," mind you!)
Orion 17 learns that there is a research center in the city of Keye
(called the Institute for Investigation into the Mind of Marrow), which
is working with marrow and exposed the townspeople to it on the day of
Orion 17's vision, as an experiment. Orion begs to join the institute's
team of research subjects and is finally accepted. The remainder of
the story is about the experiences of Orion and two other "Marrow
Monkeys," as the research subjects are called, during their quest to
understand the nature and potential of marrow.

Loyer's story was gripping and most impressive for its linking of a
classic game interface aesthetic to its narrative content in a
compelling way. The piece received several awards, including accession
to SFMOMA's permanent collection. Loyer received a 1999 Rockefeller
Media Fellowship. He left his day job and has been "independent" ever
since. He's now working on a sequel to The Lair, entitled "Chroma."
The piece fills in some of the gaps left open by the Lair, further
develops his characters, and ultimately leads into a semi-
autobiographical narrative about racial identity.

Chroma is a full-scale production. Loyer has a cast, crew, studio, and
even spin-off products, like downloadable MP3's Still, "even more so
than Lair," he says, "Chroma is all Shockwave, all the time." Loyer
finds himself explaining that many of the things he does in Chroma can't
be done in Flash. He's built his own engine in Director, called Mneme,
that helps him create intricate time-based animation triggered by
streaming audio.

As bandwidth possibilities open up, one would assume in looking at
Loyer's substantial animations that he'd happily embrace broadband. Not
so. "Bandwidth makes people lazy," he claims. "There is an economy of
program design that is enforced at low bandwidths which can have very
positive creative effects. You saw it in the classic arcade games,
which could deliver literally hours of entertainment in half as many
kilobytes as your average boring Web page." Loyer is releasing Chroma
in chapters, and it just so happens that the next chapter is actually an
homage to a favorite old Apple II game: Wizardry.

Loyer says that the Lair was a deliberate attempt to get back to that
old way of working, to "resist the temptation to fill up what little
bandwidth was available in 1997 with photographs and video. I wanted
everything to be as programmatic and abstract as possible, although I
did realize that having good quality audio could do a lot for the
experience, and so I learned how to use Shockwave's audio streaming
capabilities." Chroma maintains this approach, while amping up the
visuals. Images, however, always come second to story for Loyer. The
story is about experience, not rote navigation. Same for the interface.
Then again, Loyer admits, "from a technological perspective, I hate to
think that my work is going to be 5-10 years behind the game consoles
forever."

Between completing "The Lair of the Marrow Monkey" and beginning
"Chroma," Loyer created "Resisting the Epic." Resisting is a
visualization of Loyer's thesis that "interactive designers are
conditioned to want to create works that are at odds with what the
medium does best, leading to disappointing results." Loyer thinks that
our culture holds "grandiose visions for the potential of digital media"
fed by a popular understanding of the Hollywood