Tip number one for aspiring Internet artists: Above all else, first ensure that your piece is not an ugly mess. All Biennial-listed sites but two demand that viewers be willing to pretty much randomly click through a panoply of links, without really knowing what each mouse-click will achieve. If you want people to do this, encourage them by making your confusing mindfucks attractive. In this regard, only Ben Benjamin's Superbad site succeeds.
A randomly linked set of pages, mostly abstract patterns with a few text-based pages, Superbad is well designed, attractive, and confusing in a kind of joyful way. It's a pleasure to put yourself into its hands, clicking away without worrying about where you're going. A story written by a child, "The Mystery of Monster Mountain (and Captin America)," is the site's highlight.
I'll admit to being generally uninterested in Mark Amerika, the Fiction Collective 2-supported writer whose piece Grammatron mixes language poetry, Oulipo, and French theory to dull ends. Words and sentence fragments successively load onto the screen, accompanied by poorly lit gifs that superimpose text on distorted found images. When one of the opening pages followed up the French word Ă©criture (writing) with "a creature," I quickly lost interest. Language play may have sustained writers as various as Nabokov and Derrida, but surely there's enough of it in the world by now.
A much more directly told tale is Darcey Steinke's "Blindspot," hosted by the venerable, Walker Art Center-supported online art site äda'web. Steinke, a novelist, has written a semi-straightforward story about a mother and her baby, an apartment, and a possible intruder. As the story unfolds -- and you can progress straight through it or jump across it via hyperlinks embedded in the text -- the screen divides into frames, with images of a New York apartment, a floor plan, and objects referred to in the text. There's a certain difficulty in reading a story online, particularly one built to quickly click around: The speed of a web-surfer's attention shifts is quite a bit faster than the speed at which one reads a story. But "Blindspot" remains a surprisingly effective foray into hypertext.
Fakeshop is an ambitious collaborative project that, like many of the pieces, is mostly about its medium. Typing in its URL gives your computer over to a series of self-replicating, continuously opening windows. Fake error messages refer to some Microsoft/Intel conspiracy ("WINTEL has been working hard to bring you the operating system that is in your best interest"). Blurry images, soundtracks, and technical "information" fill your screen, and the only way to make them stop is to quit out of your browser. Much like some of the more unsavory porn sites.
I've written about John Simon's Every Icon before: a simple site that generates a 32-by-32 grid, then fills it with every possible combination of black or white squares. Beginning with an all-white grid, it progresses to all black, a process that takes somewhere around several hundred trillion years to conclude, depending on your processor speed and bandwidth. Simon's project has an attractive clarity of focus and purity of execution, compared with his web-art fellows.
There are surprising omissions -- if ®tmark deserves inclusion, then the highly publicized etoy.com does too; I'd have loved to see one of zaius.com's or word.com's pieces as well -- but given the spotty quality of most Internet art sites, even the included sites, I must again commend the Biennial's curatorial team for its focus.
