Internetic Installations

The issue of how to design, create, and install "internetic art" is a challenge. Even the most basic idea of displaying one's visual work or offering a sound piece has to have purpose and intrigue for the users of the Net. Typically, I find that even in a text based environment, it's difficult to attend to every detail that an author has provided. At the moment, owing to the relative slowness of the average user's hardware combined with the large amounts of data that comprise media files, it is sometimes a torturous process to read a page that contains many graphics. This is made particularly painful when an accidental keystroke or misfired mouse click starts an irreversible retrieve of an enormous file. In the normal realm of publicly displayed art, even the largest piece is rarely an obstacle in this sense.

As the "groundskeeper" of New York Art Line, the Panix art Gopher (URL: gopher://gopher.panix.com:70/11/nyart), I have found that being on the "server" side is not easy. Before putting my work on Gopher, I experimented with the idea of an in-house BBS on Panix using Lynx as a browser. I had a number of users try out my menus, and I was amazed at how often the unanticipated path was chosen. I felt, for example, that a first line entry that said WELCOME DESK would be the obvious first choice and, therefore, the place for orientation info and the primary "hub." My beta users consistently bypassed this option and went directly to an area deep in the menu that I named "The Dada Base" and where, unfortunately, I did not yet have any material.

As my work moved to Gopher, I became aware of the need for consistency in an ever-changing world. If I was interested in having users become aware of local information that I served, I had to maintain a consistency to my directory structure or else any other established Gopher's link to that area would be broken. This meant that in many cases, you have to live with what you've done until you create a clever way to redirect to your new areas. At the same time, you need to let users know that you're Gopher is not static. Some means for drawing users beyond the consistent look of the main menu is often needed.

My Gopher area now also has a link to my home page where I get to offer the freer form of the Web to users who are browsing with html readers. The home pages of the Web can, to some extent, get by on personality more than consistency. While things do change in the world of Gopher, there is an element of predictability once you're familiar with a particular type of Gopher, such as Arts Gophers. After a while, they start to reference each other and as I look for new links, I frequently find the same core group of Gophers and even similar menu headings. As I embark into the Web, it seems to be an ever-changing and growing resource. One is not better than the other. They are different. Gopher is more like the catalog of your library, while Web is like the magazine stand. The Web, Gopher, FTP, and telnet are the current primary Internet realms where artists can presently create online public installations.